


you, there

by Roadie



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Endgame Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, F/F, Fix-It, Maggie Sawyer & Winn Schott friendship, POV Maggie Sawyer, Post-3x05, schawyer brotp, see what i did there?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-03-02 08:02:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13313940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadie/pseuds/Roadie
Summary: The worst part of being a new gay’s first is that after you’ve taught them how to be in a relationship, they expect you to teach them how to break up, too.A post- 3x05 fix it, canon-compliant through 3x09.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Me: Okay, self, no more fic-writing eating into the time you need to devote to other things!
> 
> Also me: *writes 10,000+ words of the most personal fic I've ever written, because holidays suck and writing is good for both coping and escapism*
> 
> This isn't finished but it's far enough along that I think it's ready to start posting before the hiatus ends. This thing is only going to be probably 3 chapters total, and they may come up a little more slowly than I typically post because I'm forcing myself to manage my time better (ie be less obsessive about my fic when I have it on the go).
> 
> Also... this is like whoa personal? Like, so personal I didn't originally think I would post it. Lots and lots of stuff here taken from my life or the lives of people close to me. But I'm also kind of proud of it? Maybe because of that? So it's very different from the other stuff I've posted in this fandom and I'm not sure how that's going to fly. 
> 
> But I promise you a Sanvers happy ending. Not quite as fluffy as the one I wrote in "Fur and Feathers," but a happy ending for them nonetheless.
> 
> In terms of **content warnings**... not much. There is, at one point, a reference to the fact that pedophiles exist and that they screw up people's lives near-irreparably, but it's at a remove and doesn't directly implicate any canon characters or significant OCs. Also homophobia and racism.

Your “friend” is a guy named Danny, the only actual partner you ever had on the force that you liked. You haven’t worked with him for a few years because he decided to transfer divisions when his first kid was born, over to something a little lower-risk, but you still walk up two floors to chat with him over his desk for lunch every now and then, and you get along well with his wife. He was divorced once, too, from a woman he married way too young, so you know he’ll get it, probably, and not ask too many questions, and not ask you to talk about it.

But his only guest space is a fold-out couch. And they have two kids now, three and five, girl and boy respectively, and they’re gender-normative as fuck so the boy pulls shit like stealing his sister’s dolls to play keep-away and the girl chases him around the house screeching and there’s literally nowhere to escape when your bed’s in the middle of the goddamn living room.

Two days of screaming children, apologetic parents, and no privacy to completely fucking lose your shit in your grief and your rage and, fuck it, you fill out an application blind for a furnished studio apartment in a shitty neighborhood. You know it’ll suck. You don’t even care. It only costs a little more than what you paid to cover half the rent when you lived with Alex, so if you’re careful you’ll be able to save enough money to start buying your own furniture again, piece by piece.

You’ll start with a bed, you decide. Then a TV, then a sofa, then a coffee table, then a stereo. You can get some plates and silverware at Goodwill; you don’t care if they match. You’ll want a toaster at some point, and a frying pan and a saucepan. Oh, and a microwave.

Hell. With any luck, some of the stuff you donated to Goodwill when you moved in with Alex will still be there, and you can buy it back.

 

\--

 

The apartment sucks, but it sucks less than you expect it to. Your upstairs neighbor throws fucking loud parties but all it takes is you showing up once, your badge on one hip and gun on the other because “you just got off shift” (no you didn’t), and he clams up. There’s an older lady who lives alone across the hall and every now and then you’re able to help her carry her groceries up to the second-floor walkup.

It’s the little things that help you feel like less of a total waste of space.

You buy a sanitary cover to zip over the mattress in your apartment and splurge on some nice, high-thread-count sheets, because you figure it’ll be awhile before you’ll be doing anything in this bed except sleeping so you might as well do that in style.

(You spend a lot of time crying in that bed, too, for the first week or two.)

(Then you snap yourself out of it, because life doesn’t stop for a broken heart and crying like a baby doesn’t fix anything and it’s time to pick yourself up and keep stepping forward, because that’s just what you do.)

 

\--

 

You keep going to Dollywood, because dammit, it was _your_ bar first.

You have to do some mental gymnastics to justify it to yourself. At the end of the day, the bar is an alien safe haven, and you’re 100% less alien than Kara, J’onn, or Mon-el, let alone all three of them together. But you’ve spent almost three years cultivating this place, making yourself familiar and trustworthy and deserving to the people who come here, so that they’ll tell you when they know someone is dangerous and they’ll come to you when they need help.

Alex has gotten basically everything in this fucking breakup, and giving up the bar would be giving up almost three years of hard work that helps you do your job, and That. Is. Not. Happening.

You show up a week after the breakup and see J’onn sitting by himself at the bar. He waves at you, flick of the fingers and a nod, but thankfully, doesn’t invite you over.

It’s probably because he’s psychic and knows you don’t want to talk to him.

A week after that you’re there again, playing pool by yourself, when the whole crew walks in. You recognize their voices when they arrive but it seems like they don’t notice you. They walk back, grab an empty table, flag down Darla who takes their order.

You force yourself not to rush to finish your game. Then you finish your beer. Then you walk out.

 

\--

 

 **Alex (Yesterday 10:11 pm):** Sorry. That... was weird.

 **Alex (Yesterday 10:11 pm):** I saw you at the pool table but I didn't know what to do.

 

 **Alex (Yesterday 10:48 pm):** I know you saw me, too. What should we do next time? I can follow your lead.

 

 **Alex (Today 8:32 am):** I guess I'll just follow your lead. I hope you have a good day.

 

\--

 

The texts don’t even read like Alex. She never capitalizes or punctuates that carefully.

She put a lot of thought into them.

You don’t answer.

The worst part of being a new gay’s first is that after you’ve taught them how to be in a relationship, they expect you to teach them how to break up, too.

  


\--

 

 

 **Alex (Today 4:13 pm):** The jeweler gave us a 50% refund on what we paid so far for the rings. Your share will go back on your cc

 

\--

  


You help the old lady across the hall, Mrs. Simpson, with her groceries for the second time this week. She has one of those wire-frame pull-carts and it’s full and weighs a _ton_. You have no idea how she would have gotten it up the stairs without you.

But she lived here before you did, so she must have managed.

“I don’t usually have quite this much,” she says apologetically, “but sometimes it seems that you run out of everything all at once, you know? And then I ask the Super to help me carry it up, but I guess he’s not in today.”

“It’s okay,” you say. “I’m happy to help.”

“Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?” she asks you.

You pause for a second in the dingy hallway, and then shrug. It’s not like there’s anything waiting for you at your place.

“Sure,” you say.

Her apartment is the same tiny size as yours. She has a daybed opposite a small TV and a two-seater table by her kitchen. It’s cluttered but organized: the trinkets and paraphernalia of the elderly.

She has a bunch of photos on the wall above the table. Two boys and a girl at various stages of life, but the most recent ones look like they’re at least a decade old, based on the clothing and hairstyles. One boy is blond, his hair alternately bowl-cut and center-parted and buzzed, freckles dusted over his nose. The other boy has tan skin and dark hair… he looks Pacific Islander, maybe, or Native American? And the girl is Black. In the youngest photos, her hair looks untamed, sometimes corralled into twin braids that don’t fall neatly, but in the photos where she’s a teen and older, she looks more comfortable with it, with long braids, an Afro in one photo, and several where she’s clearly started using a relaxer.

Mrs. Simpson sees you looking at the photos.

“My kids,” she explains. “All adopted, of course. Tom, the blond boy, is my eldest. Then the other two are Janey and Ricky.”

You can tell just by the tone of her voice that Tom is the apple of her eye.

“Where do they live?” you ask.

“Tom lives upstate. Jane and Rick are both here in town. Janey works for an insurance company, and Ricky is licensed to operate those giant cranes. You know, the ones they build skyscrapers with.”

Strange. You’ve lived here two months but you’ve never seen them. Aging mother, you think they’d be around from time to time to help her out.

But it’s not like you’re going to ask her about it.

Mrs. Simpson sets your tea in front of you. It’s in a little china teacup with a saucer; you haven’t seen the like of it since your abuela, when you were twelve or so, down in Mexico.

She passed away when you were sixteen. Your Tía couldn’t afford to take you down to Mexico when you were living with her, so that visit when you were twelve was the last time you saw her. She was short, like you turned out to be, and had thick, grey hair with black streaks, and was stout and solid. The thing you remember most clearly about her, though, was she spoke Spanish with the same accent and inflection as your mother, her daughter.

“Thank you,” you say. Mrs. Simpson sets a little pitcher of milk and a bowl of sugar beside you. You don’t touch the milk -- you don’t have a lactaid with you -- but you sweeten your tea a little.

You’re not sure how to make small talk when Mrs. Simpson sits down in the chair opposite you, but she covers it for you.

“Ricky’s one of the men the city likes to hire when they need to repair the damage after Supergirl gets into one of her tiffs with some bad guy or another,” she says, her voice suffused with pride. “Bless that young woman, honestly, but I do wish she could find ways to keep us safe without breaking quite so many things. Tax money doesn’t grow on trees, you know! Although I guess those repairs do keep my Ricky eating steaks…”

You sip your tea and listen to the old woman prattle on about her kids.

  


\--

  


Winn invites you to his birthday party. Twice.

You don’t reply.

You wish Danvers would talk to her friends and explain how breakups work. Or that her friends, or one of the more world-experienced ones like James, would sit down and explain it to her.

You’re _not_ doing the fucking lesbian thing where you try to be besties at the same time that you’re trying to fall out of love.

  


\--

  


You see Alex at the bar again. You’re not at the pool table, you’re shooting the shit with a Tanalorian who only landed on-world two weeks ago, when Alex and Kara and J’onn walk in with another man, older, that you haven’t seen before.

“ _Two_ Green Martians?” the Tanalorian says lowly. “I thought they were all killed off. This planet, man. Full of surprises.”

Tanalorians have extremely sophisticated senses of sight. With their naked eyes, they can see to the molecular level, so they very, very rarely misidentify species, which means that the older man must be the second Martian.

You file that away. Hard to know how the alien community will react to the appearance of another member of a species thought extinct.

Alex catches your eyes as she walks past. She smiles at you, tips her chin in greeting, and you smile back, but then you turn your attention back to the Tanalorian. She follows your lead and doesn’t engage you.

You don’t want to be a jerk, you really don’t, but you can already tell it’s going to take you three days to recover from half a second of friendly eye contact and you really, really can’t handle the idea of making it worse.

 

\--

 

Winn texts you to see if you want to go for a beer, maybe play pool. You wish he’d take the hint.

It’s not about him. It’s about what you want to share with Alex. Which is to say: nothing.

You can’t.

But you can’t quite bring yourself to write him back to reject him, either. You’re still burning too much from your own rejection to be able to inflict anything like it, even a fraction of it, on someone else.

(You recognize you’re doing it anyway. Just… passive-aggressively. But given the options, it seems the least offensive. Or maybe just the easiest.)

 

 

\--  


Christmas comes and goes. You take the time-and-a-half pay to work that day and use the extra cash to buy a nice, gently-used couch from the rich part of town. You bought a mattress and bedframe for the extra cash you earned working Thanksgiving.

James texts you for the holiday. So does Winn.

You figure they both texted everyone on their contacts list probably, so.

Danny loans you his pickup truck to pick up the couch and bring it back to your place.

 

\--

  


Everything goes to shit with Reign.

You’re pulling twenty-hour shifts six days a week for the month it takes to get her under control, corralling civilians and talking down your crew who are pissed at having to play second-fiddle to the Feds.

They don’t know about the DEO, but of course, you do. You know they have intel and equipment beyond your wildest dreams, and that the best thing that the NCPD can do is support them.

(The NCPD is still rebuilding, infrastructurally and in terms of staffing, after the Daxamite invasion, though. So it’s easy to understand why so many of the cops are reluctant to trust this mystery federal black-ops force that, as far as they know, didn’t help them last time.)

The first time you talk to Alex, face to face, is in response to Reign.

So’s the second, and the fifth, and the tenth. Whatever awkwardness stands between you fades in the face of this new threat to the city and the planet.  Most of your communication involves her barking orders at you in situation rooms and over comms, and you organizing squads and teams to execute whatever you can execute on your end.

“Detective Sawyer,” she calls after you, as you leave the latest strategic meeting to take your new orders back to the precinct.

You stop, turn, look back at her, your cop-face on to meet her agent-face.

But it’s not her agent face that meets you at all. The eyes that catch yours are soft, the furrowed brow relaxed, as though you’re back in her kitchen and she’s greeting you getting home after a long day of work.

“Thank you, Maggie,” she says, with a warmth that you’ve refused to let yourself miss since it left your life. “I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have you to coordinate our NCPD partnership.”

You shrug. “Protecting the city is my job, Agent Danvers.”

Her shoulders sag a little at your use of her title. But this is what your relationship is, now. It’s what it _has_ to be.

Over those weeks you see Supergirl go down, hard, time and time again, and somehow show up to fight again two days later.

You see a bunch of other heroes, new ones you don’t recognize, showing up to help her out.

Then Supergirl goes down and you don’t see her for awhile. Four days. Five. A week.

You can’t…

  
\--

 

 **You (Today 7:21 pm):** Is she okay?

 

 **Winn (Today 7:23 pm):** Touch and go for awhile but she's on the mend now under the lights

 **Winn (Today 7:23 pm):** Thanks for asking. Good to hear from you

 

\--

 

You text Winn because you can’t bring yourself to text Alex.

  


\--

  


Reign is defeated.

The city is in pieces, but Reign is defeated.

Mrs. Simpson has you over for tea again.

“Ricky must be working a lot right now,” you say, by way of smalltalk.

Mrs. Simpson hums and smiles at you.

 

\--

 

Small victories: after Reign, it’s a little easier to interact with Alex when you run into each other at the bar or on crime scenes.

You’re not afraid to reach out to her when you stumble into a case that merits DEO involvement. She’s not afraid to mention you by name when she needs an NCPD contact.

You acknowledge one another. Tip you chins in greeting, sometimes even smile, before going about your own separate evenings. You’re at the bar one day after a big, successful bust, and she has the bartender bring you a shot of Talisker on her tab. She doesn’t come over, you don’t talk to each other, but you both know why she did it.

 

\--

 

Turns out that Tanalorian you met has a sister.

She’s beautiful. Purple-tinted skin and green hair in her natural state, at the bar, though she wears makeup and a wig most of the time, to help blend in.

You have a beer with her at the bar, and then a coffee out at a coffee shop a few days later. She asks you about human and earthen courtship rituals: they confuse her, she says, since she’s accustomed to interacting with people who can see each other’s neural and vascular responses to their interactions, and so they can understand one another’s desires and reactions immediately.

So you explain it to her. A few nights later, you have dinner at an Italian place you like, and at the end of the night you want to kiss her. But kissing is a species-specific behavior; not all off-worlders like it. So you figure you’ll take your time, wait on it a bit, see if she’s sure she likes dating you, and then you can talk to her about how humans tend to take the next step of physical intimacy and see if that’s something she’d want.

But then she doesn’t call you back.

Fair enough, you think. Maybe she isn’t ready for earth dating. Or dating at all. Or maybe she isn’t into you that way, which is… disappointing, but her prerogative.

Two weeks after your date, you walk into the bar to see her mauve skin and green hair making out with someone in a corner booth.

Well. That answers that question, you suppose, and you tell yourself it’s up to her, that of course you have to respect what she wants.

They shift in the booth, she turns her head, and you’d recognize those ear piercings, that jawline, that jaw-length haircut anywhere.

You turn on your heel and walk out before either of them sees you and tell yourself you don’t actually have any desire to punch a wall.

You aren’t sure what you were thinking, deciding it would be a good idea to transition from a failed relationship with someone new to being gay to a new relationship with someone new to being human. Or at least, new to living among humans.

Maybe they can learn a thing or two from one another. Whatever.

 

\--

  
**Winn (Today 9:32 am):** HBD! B-)  


\--

 

 **James (Today 10:15 am):** Happy birthday, Maggie!  


\--

 

It’s your birthday.

It’s been six months since you broke up.

The guys at work buy you a six-pack of craft beer and an extra-small men’s workout tanktop that says “I’m your girlfriend’s favorite boyfriend.”

You park your bike at your building after work and walk to the Safeway a block away.

You buy a cupcake, red velvet with white frosting, and take it home.

You don’t have birthday candles. It would be dumb to buy a whole box. But you do have tealights, a dusty bag of them under the sink in case the power goes out, so you fish one out and set it, complete with its little metal cup, on top of the too-hard commercial frosting, and light it with one of the matches you keep in there with the tealights.

It’s dumb, you’re not really superstitious, but you remember that one scene from the pilot episode of that fairy tale show where Jennifer Morrison makes a wish on her cupcake candle and it comes true. So you figure: why not. Standing here, in the shittiest apartment you’ve lived in since college, alone on your birthday, you literally have nothing to lose.

You blow out the candle, and _wish_.

Then you wait.

And wait.

And wait.

...damn it.

You eat the whole cupcake. Then you wipe the frosting off the bottom of the tealight with a paper towel and put it back in the bag. It’s barely used, after all.

You rinse the plastic box and put it in the recycling. You put the wax-paper muffin-cup in the trash.

You sit down on your sofa and turn on the TV. It takes a frustrating minute for you to find the roku remote: it had gotten wedged between the couch cushions, probably when you passed out in the middle of that episode of Breaking Bad the other night.

When you finally find it, it doesn’t work.

Fuck.

You go to the junk drawer in your kitchen and dig through for some fresh batteries, but apparently the ones you put in your vibrator last night were the last ones you had.

You contemplate going to get those.

Screw it. Vibrator’s more important.

The remote for the TV itself uses the wrong size battery, so you can’t switch those over either.

You sit back down with the roku remote and pop the dead batteries out. With a deep breath and a silent prayer, you shake them and reverse them and try them again.

And finally, the universe seems to decide to bestow an act of birthday kindness upon you: it works.

Thank you, birthday candle wish. You would have liked a random real friend, but a one-way relationship with your TV is a relationship you’re actually capable of sustaining, so. You’ll take it.

It probably won’t work for long, but it lasts long enough for you to navigate to your show and start it, and you can just let it run, now, for as long as you want. Or at least until Netflix asks if you’re still there. Which, fuck it, you will be, even if you’re asleep.

You’ve just gotten through the opening credits when someone knocks on your door.

The hell?

You go to the door, Breaking Bad still running behind you because you can’t pause the damn thing with no juice in your remote. You hope nothing important happens while you’re telling this random delivery person that they have the wrong apartment.

But you check the peephole, and it’s not a delivery person.

...it’s Winn, looking jittery and nervous and biting his lip.

You open the door, and he’s got one of those little six-inch round supermarket birthday cakes in one hand and a paper bag full of… something in the other.

“Hey,” he says. He shuffles nervously and glances past her, into the apartment, looking to see if he’s interrupting anything. “I would have called, but I was pretty sure you wouldn’t pick up. Or if you did, you’d try to tell me not to come. But, um. Happy birthday?” He holds the cake up nervously, wincing like he’s afraid you might punch him.

It’s a face you’ve seen him pull before, but for the first time, it occurs to you to wonder why Winn is so easily scared of people.

“How’d you know it was my birthday?” you ask.

“I looked it up awhile ago,” he says, and he was clearly prepared for that question. “After you and Alex broke up and it became pretty clear you weren’t going to be hanging out with us anymore.”

So it’s a pity thing.

Fucking privileged white people and their savior complexes.

“Listen, Winn,” you say, and his face falls a little right away, “I appreciate it, thanks, but this isn’t a good time—“

He nods nervously. “O-okay,” he stutters. Then he holds out the cake. “This is for you, anyway.”

It says “Happy Birthday Maggie” on it, green frosting on chocolate buttercream.

You nod at him and smile in thanks.

“Listen, Maggie,” he says in a rush, “look, I—I know we don’t know each other that well. We were more group friends than one-on-one friends, and I mean, there was that one time you arrested me, and you’re, like, so _cool_ it’s intimidating and I’m basically the definition of the kid who got swirlies during passing periods in middle school, but like…” he swallows hard, “I think we have more in common than you think.”

Your eyebrows crawl up your forehead, but you don’t say anything, waiting for him to continue.

“We don’t have families,” he explains. “Both of us have horrible people for parents—“

“My parents aren’t horrible people,” you interrupt. You still feel strongly about that, though you couldn’t really explain why. “They did something horrible to me,” you qualify, “but they’re not… they’re not horrible people.”

“Okay,” Winn demurs, “well, my dad is an objectively _horrible_ person. And yours, well, I’ve seen how he treats you.”

Of course. Winn was at the shower.

One of the many gifts your father gave you that day was that the sequence of gut-punches that were your interactions with him have caused a lot about the shower itself to kind of fade into the background of your memories of the day.

“I was twelve,” Winn says, “my father went to prison for murder, and I went into the system, and it just… it messed me up, man, I couldn’t build friendships or relationships for… until Kara and James, basically. Like really, if you want to identify future hackers, look for the kids with trust issues because we always want to know everything about everyone to minimize the risks and the surprises, I’m telling you—“

“Winn.” You have to interrupt his rambling.

“Right! Right. So what I’m saying is, I know what it’s like to have your only family be the family you choose and build for yourself.”

All the air wants to rush out of your lungs. You try to let it go slowly, so he doesn’t notice.

“I just, I figured that if you had that, I’d have met them, or at least heard about them from you, back before—before. And I just, I think you’re really cool, Maggie, even if you did arrest me that one time, and I want to, like…” he sighs. “I love James, and Kara, and J’onn, and Alex, but I feel like you and me, we know things that they’ll never really understand, and so I just, I guess—"

“Winn,” you interrupt again.

“Yeah?”

“You saying you want to be my friend, Winn?”

He squares his shoulders and says, resolutely, “I’m saying I want to be your family.”

Your eyebrows shoot up, and he sags a little. “Or your friend? Or, like… audition for the part? I guess?”

All the air rushes out of your lungs again, and this time, you can’t stop it.

Birthday candles. Jesus.

You take the cake from his outstretched hand.

“Oh thank god,” he gasps, dropping his arm, “I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold that.”

You hold the door open for him.

“For the record,” you say, as you lock the door and take the cake to the kitchenette counter, “I was… very, very much not cool in high school.”

“Ha. I don’t believe that.”

“No swirlies,” you say, “but locker vandalism, insults in the hallways, lunches alone on the days I could make it to a table without some jock flipping my tray out of my hands.”

He sighs, fake fondly. “Those were the days, weren’t they? Getting tripped in class. Kids used to call me “Shit Schott” because that’s what they thought was poetic when we were fourteen.”

“Oh, yeah. ‘Faggy Maggie’ at your service. Also ‘Spic with the dick' when they wanted the one-two punch of racism and homophobia together.”

There had been more generic slurs, too, of course. But thinking back, now, it’s the other things -- the hidden hatred, the manipulation from behind the scenes, that burns more than the things said straight to your face.

 

\--

 

One particular memory:

You lost Eliza two months ago.

As soon as the teacher gave you the choice to change seats, she picked one several rows back from you. She used to sit beside you.

You do an in-class quiz. When it’s finished, everyone in the class has to pass their paper to the student behind them, and that student grades the assignment based on the teacher’s answers and then passes it back.

You pass your paper back to the student behind you. You barely know the girl, but she follows the pack when it comes to shunning you. You hear her snickering with her desk-mate, but you can’t make out what she’s saying.

Your school work has gone to hell since you moved in with your aunt. You can’t fucking concentrate, ever.

When you get your paper back, the grade doesn’t totally suck. But it’s got a huge blob of white-out in the margin, covering what appears to be a lot of words or maybe a drawing.

You shouldn’t want to know what it says. She covered it up, after all.

You flip the paper to see if you can see the words or the pen through the paper — but she’s put white-out on the back of the page, too, so you can’t see it there, either.

At home, that evening, you sit cross-legged on your bed and pick at the white-out, trying to see if you can get it to flake away so you can see what’s under it, but all you manage to do is tear the paper.

Sixteen years later, you still wonder what she wrote.

 

\--

 

Winn has brought birthday candles, a 3 and a 1 for your age. You blow them out, and then it’s easier than you would expect to shoot the shit with him while you both lean against the kitchen counter and eat cake standing up.

When you’re done, he picks up his bag and shows you the contents.

“I really don’t know what you like to do for fun,” he says, “so we could totally go somewhere and play pool or something, or maybe darts which I’m actually much better at, but I brought my x-box and a few of my favorite games because who doesn’t like mario kart and zombie shooting? Or we could just — is that Breaking Bad? I love that show, totally down for watching it again…”

You hook up his x-box and play some mindless zombie-shooting game. You curse that you’d have a much higher hit percentage if you were actually firing a real gun, and he ribs you back that real gun-skills don’t count in the fake world of Zombiepocalypse.

You share your craft beer with him and stay up later than you probably should on a work night.

It’s the most fun you’ve had in… well, since. Then.

“Listen,” you say, as he’s packing up his stuff, “I just… I can’t be around Alex right now. Maybe one day, but it’s gonna take awhile. And I don’t ever want you to have to choose, so if there’s ever a situation where you feel like you have to, I want you to choose her. I _want_ that. Okay?”

He nods affably. “I mean, we’ll see how things play out. But for now, sure, I can go with that.”

You undress, brush your teeth, and slip into bed.

Winn Schott, you think to yourself, with a little laugh. Who’d have thought?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The task force to manage the situation is a good partnership. The DEO has the tech to contain the Infernian once they get him, and to try to mitigate his impact if he loses his cool, so to speak, before you can talk him down. But Supergirl can’t punch her way into a hostage situation with an Infernian -- the risk of civilian casualties is too high. And the DEO doesn’t do hostage negotiation.
> 
> But you do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to pedophilia, mentioned in the chapter 1 notes, happen in this chapter. Child abuse too, at the same time. 
> 
> Sorry for the darkness? This one just... wanted to be a melancholy fic, I guess. But again: I promise Sanvers reunion and resolution at the end of this thing.

You hang out with Winn once a week, give or take, when your schedules allow it. Turns out you’re a pretty even match at darts, and you both suck equally at bowling. You both have a secret, carefully-hidden love of fruity, floofy tiki cocktails. 

You go to a gay bar together.

“I really am straight,” he says, almost apologetically. “People used to call me gay all the time, to the point where I actually started to believe it, and I even tried it once or twice, and just…” he shakes his head. “Not for me. But I like going to gay bars. I feel safer there, and the music is  _ awesome _ , and I get hit on  _ way  _ more than I do, like, literally anywhere else, including on Tinder, so.”

You narrow your eyes at him. “What do you do when guys hit on you?”

“Well, it doesn’t happen much. Saying it happens more than on Tinder is like… a low bar. But I just… try be polite but not to reciprocate, you know, and usually that’s all it takes. If I have to, I just say I’m not interested.”

“You don’t tell them you’re straight?”

Winn’s jaw drops and he backpedals. “I mean, should I? I usually don’t if I don’t have to, because I kind of feel like… I don’t know, like it’s a power move to bring up that I’m straight in a gay bar? Like, it’s douchey and kind of not the point -- all that really matters is that I’m not into them, right?”

You throw an arm around him in an awkward side-hug, because, like, he  _ gets  _ it. “You’re a good egg, Winn Schott.”

 

—  
  


Mrs. Simpson takes a fall, and you’re the one who finds her.

She’s lying in her open door when you get home from your shift, her purse lying just beyond her reach. She’s pale, her breathing is shallow, her lips a little blue.

You crash to your knees beside her. “Mrs. Simpson,” you say, snapping your fingers near her eyes for her attention. “Mrs. Simpson, can you hear me?”

She rolls her eyes toward you after a moment. You’ve seen this often enough to recognize the symptoms of shock. 

You pull your phone from your pocket and call 911.

The paramedics come and they ask you if you want to ride in the ambulance with her.

There’s nobody else there to be with her and you don’t like the idea of her going alone, so you agree. 

You stay out of their way while they examine her in the ambulance, which also helpfully keeps you from having to figure out how to interact with her in this situation that’s far more intimate than you feel comfortable sharing with her. 

At the hospital, you watch them wheel her away to x-ray and then stand awkwardly in the intake area, holding her purse and unsure of what to do with yourself. 

A young, tired, but kind-looking nurse approaches you with a clipboard. “You came in with Irene Simpson, right? Are you her family?”

“No, no,” you say, “I’m her neighbor. I just found her like that when I got home from work.”

“Okay,” the nurse nods, “Does she have any family? All things considered, her injuries don’t seem too severe, but at her age, even a relatively mild fracture will take a lot of work to heal.”

You nod, listening. “She’s told me that two of her kids live in town, but I don’t know how to…” Of course — you’re holding her purse with her phone in it. It’s probably locked, but it might have an ICE number in it, if one of her kids helped her set it up. 

“I’ll see if I can get ahold of someone,” you tell the nurse.

Her phone is an older model iPhone, probably one that used to belong to someone else. And sure enough, the ICE number is programmed to a Jane Simpson. 

You hit dial.

A woman’s voice answers. “Hey, mom, this isn’t a good time—“

“This isn’t, um, this isn’t your mother. Is this Jane Simpson?”

“Yes, who is this? Is my mother okay?”

“Well, no — My name is Maggie Sawyer, I’m her neighbor. I’m with her at the hospital now. I’m afraid she took a fall earlier today, and the hospital is trying to find her family.”

A long, pregnant pause stretches between you.

“Okay,” Jane says, finally. “Which hospital?”

“National City General.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. With traffic at this time of day, it’ll probably take an hour.”

“Sure. I’ll tell the nurses.”

“Thanks.”

You hang up. Jane seems cold, terse, over the phone, almost like she’s annoyed that her mother’s accident will interrupt her day.

You wonder how anyone with a mother as sweet as Mrs. Simpson could seem so, frankly, ungrateful. Entitlement runs deep, you suppose.

Forty-five minutes later, Jane strides in. You recognize her as an older version of the woman in the photos in Mrs. Simpson’s kitchen. She’s maybe ten years older than you, a fair-skinned African American woman of average height and build, in an impeccably-tailored power suit with long braids tucked into a tidy french twist.

She’s… starkly attractive, with high cheekbones and dark eyes and perfectly-applied makeup and an overall air of I’ve-got-it-together-so-get-out-of-my-way.

“Jane?” You ask.

She stops, turning to you. “Yes.”

You walk up to her with your hand outstretched. “Maggie Sawyer.”

She shakes with a professional grip and smiles tightly. 

“Sorry,” you say, “I didn’t mean to be weird, I just recognized you from the photos she has up.” You offer her her mother’s purse, which she takes. 

“Thank you, Ms. Sawyer,” she says. “You didn’t have to stay. I’ve got things from here.” Her tone is brusque.

You can’t help it: she might be beautiful, but everything about her rubs you the wrong way. You’ve never seen her before and you’ve lived across the hall from her elderly mother for what, nine, ten months now?

When you get outside, you curse at the realization that you’ll have to flag down a cab to get home.

 

\--

 

You contemplate calling Winn to have a drink after your dumb evening, but it’s already late and you both have work in the morning.

One day passes, and then another, and you wonder what happened to Mrs. Simpson.

On the fourth evening after she went to the hospital, someone knocks on your door.

It’s Jane Simpson.

She looks different now, in skinny jeans and a sweater and ballet flats with her braids pulled back into a ponytail. She looks softer, and less stressed-out.

“Hi,” she says nervously.

“Hey,” you respond. “How’s Mrs. Simpson?”

“She’s okay. Fractured her hip. Well, her pelvic bone, near her hip. Turns out she had some undiagnosed osteoporosis.”

You don’t know how to respond to that, so you just nod, and wait.

“I brought you this,” Jane says, offering you a paper bag she’s been holding. You take it and peek inside: it’s a bottle of Laphroaig. 

“To thank you for taking care of her,” Jane explains. “She told me you said you liked scotch. I didn’t know what kind you preferred, so I just got you one of my favorites. It’s the ten-year.”

You grin. “Wow, you didn’t have to do that. But thanks. Laphroaig is one of my favorites, too.”

“Nothing like a good, smokey Islay.”

“I agree.” 

You both hover awkwardly until, even more awkwardly and impulsively, you invite her in for a drink of the scotch she just brought. Her body seems to sag a little in relief as she accepts.

Your place still looks a little like a collegiate bachelor pad, but it’s gotten better, little by little, as you’ve replaced the unit furniture with your own, and it looks lived-in but it’s not a total wreck.

This is the first time you’ve had anyone but Winn in this apartment.

You open the scotch and pour two fingers for each of you. Then you open a bag of Smart Pop and pour it into a bowl for the coffee table. 

“What’s the prognosis?” you ask.

She savors her first sip of scotch, inhaling its aroma. “She’ll need to be in a nursing home for awhile, and then a rehab facility. After that, I’m hoping she’ll be willing to look into a retirement home, maybe one where she could get into assisted living eventually. This is probably a sign she shouldn’t be alone anymore.”

You nod. It’s a responsible and logical plan. But it leaves you with unexpected sadness: you’ll miss having Mrs. Simpson across the hall.

Maybe this is the universe’s way of telling you that it’s time to graduate out of this shithole into somewhere a little nicer again. You’ve got enough furniture now that you could get a one-bed without totally drowning in empty space.

“Have Ricky and Tom come to see her?”

She laughs drily. “No. They won’t, either.”

You wonder why on earth they wouldn’t. What you wouldn’t give for a mother to be as proud of you as Mrs. Simpson is of all of her kids.

You shoot the shit for awhile. You tell her you’re a detective with the NCPD. She tells you about her insurance business. She asks you why you’re living here, seeming to imply that as a detective you could surely afford something nicer.

It’s an odd question, since her mother lives right across the hall, so commenting on your living conditions seems to comment on hers by extension. But Jane doesn’t seem malicious in her question. She keeps your eye contact, listens carefully when you speak. She seems  _ interested _ in what you have to say in a way that few people are, these days.

So you mention, as off-handedly as you can, that you had to rebuild when your ex-fiancée broke off your engagement and kept the apartment where you’d both been living. 

She groans empathetically. “My ex got just about everything in our breakup,” she says, “including custody of our kids.”

Dutifully, you ask to see photos of the kids. She pulls a few up on her phone and scrolls through them with you. They’re fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, with cherubic little faces.

“They’ll be four next month,” she says.

Funny: Mrs. Simpson never mentioned grandchildren.

You drink your scotch and snack on a little popcorn and you’re not sure how it happens, but somehow you’re kissing Jane on your couch.  And then both of you let your hands roam, tugging at the hems of sweaters. And then you’re inviting her into your bed. 

\--

 

You allow yourself only the barest comparisons to Alex.

Jane’s body is softer, her breasts fuller. She is quieter. She is more experienced than Alex was, less nervous in her body, but has probably slept with men more often than women. Feelings of pleasure seem to surprise her.

 

\--

 

You date Jane a bit. It’s not terribly practical since she lives in the suburbs and the traffic’s brutal. You have to leave her place by 6:30 AM to be sure to arrive at the precinct by 8:00, so she mostly stays with you when you stay together, because she can commute against traffic. She has her kids on some weekends and asks you not to come around then. It’s an agreement he has with her ex-husband: the kids don’t meet new partners until those partners are serious and have the established potential to become something long-term. You respect Jane’s desire to keep her kids’ lives as stable as possible.

The sex is satisfying; the company is better than satisfying. You’re not sure if it’s a budding relationship or a friends-with-benefits kind of situation; you can’t really see yourself with her in any serious way, and while you know you’re not the only woman she’s been with, you’re pretty sure she’s mostly straight. 

“Can I ask you something personal?” you ask, a few weeks in. You’re lying in bed, in the quiet that comes after sex, in your apartment. You’re on your back, propped on the pillows, and she’s lying on her side against you, tucked under your arm.

“As long as you’re okay with me maybe not answering,” she replies.

“How come I’ve never met Tom or Ricky? I never saw any of you around here before your mom’s accident.”

Jane’s body sags a little against yours, resting under your arm. “What did Mom tell you about us?”

You shrug. “Tom lives upstate, Ricky’s a crane operator, you work in insurance south of town. And then, you know, little things as they come up. Ricky takes too much sugar in his tea and you were always the smartest kid in your class at school.”

Jane exhales. “I never really know what to tell you. Because she’s been so nice to you, and she deserves to have someone… actually  _ like _ her.”

You furrow your brow. This is taking a darker turn than you expected. Why wouldn’t anyone like a kind old lady like Mrs. Simpson?

“Tom lives upstate,” Jane says, “That’s what she says, eh?”

You hum.

“That doesn’t surprise me. He was the one she liked. But Tom’s ‘upstate living’ is serving consecutive fifteen-year sentences in Susanville for being a damn pedophile. Rick’s a mess from having grown up sharing a room with Tom. And mom used to beat the shit out of both Rick and me pretty regularly for all kinds of dumb things, not the least of which was telling her that Tom was hurting Rick.” She laughs drily. “I basically raised Rick myself, even though I was only five years older than him. I packed his school lunches and made sure he did his homework and walked him both ways from the first grade onward. But then she’d parade us all up in front of the congregation at church, this white woman who had adopted a poor Black girl and a boy from Guam, because she wanted to be told what a saint she was. And everyone believed her. They didn’t see what our life was really like.”

Jane shakes her head. You hold her closer.

“I talked to Rick after mom was hurt, you know. Told him I was making sure she was taken care of. And he was like, ‘Why? It’s not like she was ever there for us.’ I got appendicitis when I was fourteen and took myself to the hospital. She refused, said I was overreacting to a stomach ache. It wasn’t until the hospital called her to get authorization and insurance for the emergency surgery that she believed that it was a problem, but she never came to my hospital room and got upset when she had to miss work to pick me up and take me home the next day.”

You swallow hard. “Did you--do you have a father?”

You feel her shrug a little against you. “Did, once. He wasn’t very involved, and then he died not long after Rick joined the family.”

She props herself up on her elbow and looks down at you. She drags the tips of her fingers through your hair, playing with the tips of the strands.

“When I got pregnant with Lindsay and Chris, I was terrified. It was an accident. I missed a pill. I never really wanted to be a mother. I was too scared of screwing up my kids the way my mother screwed me up. But Marcus--he was okay with not having kids, we’d agreed on it, but when he found out I was pregnant, he couldn’t hide how excited it made him. I talked to him about having an abortion and he was supportive, because this wasn’t part of our plan, but I could tell that the idea disappointed him. So I had the kids. And I tell you, that man was made to be a father. And you know -- on some level, it turned out I was made to be a mother, too. When the doctor gave me those two babies to hold, I just… I never knew I could  _ feel _ so much, Maggie, they were perfect.”

“They’re beautiful,” you say to her. “I can see why you’d say that.”

“Right,” she agrees quietly. But as you look at her, her eyes tear up, their whites reddening. “And I was so scared of them. Of my power over them. They were these perfect creatures and all I could think was that I could so easily screw them up the way my mother screwed me up. So I started working longer hours. I started avoiding them, personally, emotionally… all three of them. I’d get mad at Marcus for no good reason, just so he’d be okay to have me out of the house. I was trying to protect them from me. Of course that’s the opposite of what I was achieving, because as far as they were concerned, I just wasn’t loving them. And then everything went to hell from there. Marcus filed for divorce, and we both agreed he should have custody, and I’d get some weekends and holidays. That was eighteen months ago. And that’s the mess that finally got me into therapy, so that I can be ready to be a good mother to them.” 

She drops your hair, finally, and traces one impeccable eyebrow with the tip of her finger, and then settles down into your body again, arm stretched over your stomach.

“I haven’t fully let go of Marcus, either. I still sometimes hope that maybe, if I can just get my act together, he’ll take me back. But I don’t know. He has a serious girlfriend now.”

Your mind flashes an image of Alex in the arms of that Tanalorian. 

“I think anyone would be lucky to have you in their life,” you say. 

“Oh, sweet Maggie,” she says, “I could say the same about you.” Her hand slides up to cup your breast and she tips her head up to kiss you on the neck, behind your ear. “And flattery will get you everywhere.”

You turn your head, find her mouth with yours.

 

\--

 

It seems your relationship wasn’t made to support the weight of troublesome backstories and exes that neither of you are quite over.

You’re like a magnet for bad family lives.

Things fizzle not too long after that.

You move to a slightly better apartment, and don’t hear from any of the Simpsons ever again.

 

\--

 

Winn’s having a barbecue for Labor Day, and he wants you to come.

“It’s not, like, at my place, because I couldn’t really fit anyone in there and I can’t have a barbecue on the balcony, so I booked one of those picnic spots in City Park that has a grill. I’ll get charcoal, and everyone can bring their own stuff to throw on it, and there’ll be some picnic tables and maybe cheesy lawn games and stuff. And -- and yeah, Alex says she’s going to be there, but I just. I’d really like you to come too. If you can. I think it’ll be big enough that you can avoid each other if you want to.”

You take a deep breath and swallow hard. “I’ll try,” you say. “I may not stay long. But I’ll try.”

He grins and claps you on the shoulder. “You’re the best, Sawyer.”

You show up with a box of veggie burgers and a bag of multigrain buns. James sees you and comes over to greet you with a hug. Winn is standing over the grill with Kara, making gestures that Maggie clearly interprets as him asking Kara to use her heat-vision to light the coals, and her refusing to do it out in public.

You walk over. “I got this, Schott.”

He blinks at you. “Huh?”

“Give me the lighter fluid and the matches. You don’t grow up in rural Nebraska without learning how to light a coal grill.”

He grins at you.

(In that brief exchange, Kara slips away.)

You light the grill with only a little difficulty -- it’s been years since you watched your dad do this -- and then accept Winn’s high-five when it’s glowing.

Winn titles you Assistant Grillmaster for your prowess and keeps you near him by the grill for awhile. Alex and Kara stay close to one another and away from you, you notice, which is fine. James comes by to chat for a bit, as do a rotating cast of people you vaguely know from the DEO. As burgers are ready, Winn puts them on paper plates and begins to take them around. You half-watch him as he delivers them to people, the last one going to Alex. He pauses there and they chat a little, laughing a bit, and then Alex rolls her eyes and you see Winn flinch, just a little, and Alex shifts the burger into her other hand and you realize what’s going to happen:

You don’t think it through. You don’t need to. Like a reflex, you’ve darted the steps over to them and caught Alex’s wrist in mid-air before she can smack him, even playfully, upside the head.

“Don’t,” you say.

Alex’s eyebrows climb up her forehead.

“Stop hitting him,” you say. “And stop threatening him. It’s not funny, and it’s not necessary.”

She tugs her wrist out of your grip. Her eyes are wide and inscrutable.

You turn and walk back to the grill. You hear Winn stutter out some kind of excuse or apology and chase after you.

“I’m sorry,” you say, when he catches you. You’re pulling a veggie burger out of the box.

“What? Why? I mean, maybe you made it a little weird, but nobody’s ever--”

“I’m not sorry for making it weird.” You turn to face him, cold veggie burger dangling from your fingers. “I’m sorry because I used to enable the shit she does to you. Hell, I used to pile on. That wasn’t okay.”

Winn shrugs halfheartedly. “It’s just Alex.”

“Do you--Do you _like_ it when she does that? Or when she threatens you? Or when  _ I _ threatened you, that one time?”

He winces a little and runs a hand through his hair. “I mean, no, but like, I know it’s not serious? It’s just... how she shows her love?”

“That’s a bullshit way to ‘show your love,’ Schott, and fuck everyone who ever led you to think differently. Including me.” You turn and throw the burger onto the grill with more force than is necessary. “That needs to stop.” 

You keep your eyes determinedly glued to your burger. Beside you, Winn wordlessly unboxes some hot dogs and sets them on the empty space on the grill.

You cook your burger and eat it, but you did, indeed, make it weird. Alex looks huffy and like she’s a hair’s breadth away from losing her cool on Kara, of all people. James looks like he doesn’t know who to talk to without seeming like he’s “picking a side,” so he’s hovering by himself under a nearby tree. And Winn has thrown himself further into hosting to avoid having to actually talk to anyone.

“I’m just… I’m gonna go. Thanks for having me, Winn,” you say. 

He smiles and opens his arms for a goodbye hug.

“You know,” he says, “people don’t… stick up for me much. I’m kind of used to having my place be the butt of the jokes. So… thanks.”

You smile at him. “You deserve better.”  
  


\--

 

**Kara (Today 7:06 pm)** : You were right about Winn. Thanks for sticking up for him like that.

**Kara (Today 7:06 pm)** : I’m so close to Alex that sometimes I don’t notice if she does things that she shouldn’t. We both know she doesn’t mean any harm. She’s going to break the habit. I told her I’d help by pointing out when she messes up, since Winn probably won’t.

**You (Today 7:07 pm):** Good. Thanks, Kara.

 

\--

 

**Alex (Today 8:48 pm):** hey. I just wanted to say you’re right

**Alex (Today 8:48 pm):** about winn, i mean. Im sorry, ill do better

**You (Today 8:50 pm):** Apologize to Winn, not me

**Alex (Today 8:50 pm):** I did

**Alex (Today 9:02 pm):** Im glad you’re friends with him. It was good to see you today

**You (Today 9:08 pm):** It was good to see you too.

 

\--

 

You avoid the bar for awhile.

You go to other places with Winn. Or you hang at his place, or your place.

You also start working later hours again. The overtime is nice, and it keeps you busy. So.

 

\--

 

You make a couple more attempts to date.

They all fall flat, because you’re not ready.

So you stop trying.

 

\--

 

You don’t see Alex for about six weeks, until there’s an incident involving another Infernian in the Warehouse district holding six workers hostage in exchange for safe passage off-world to a planet called Cholydon. 

Cholydon is fourteen parsecs away, and no nation on earth realistically has the resources to provide what the Infernian is asking.

The task force to manage the situation is a good partnership. The DEO has the tech to contain the Infernian once they get him, and to try to mitigate his impact if he loses his cool, so to speak, before you can talk him down. But Supergirl can’t punch her way into a hostage situation with an Infernian -- the risk of civilian casualties is too high. And the DEO doesn’t do hostage negotiation.

But you do.

You spend eighteen hours on comms with the angry, terrified alien, who landed himself on the wrong side of a Kruvite gang and wants off-world transport to avoid being killed. Cholydon is the only known inhabited planet with an atmosphere hospitable to Infernians but toxic to Kruvites. 

Four hours in, Alex wordlessly hands you a burrito from your favorite place.

Seven hours in, she hands you your gym shoes. You don’t know how she got them -- she must have had someone from the precinct get them from your locker -- but you pace while you’re on the phone, and you know that she knows that there’s only so long you can pace in your boots.

Twelve hours in, she brings you coffee -- large, with almond milk and agave like you like it. You’ve been surviving on the shit the other cops bring you from the doughnut shop down the road, but Alex knows what you actually like to drink.

Thirteen hours in, she brings you an all-natural protein drink you like -- and a cupcake. Then she hands you a toothbrush and a bottle of water, in turns, so that you can brush your teeth and feel just a bit less gross.

At around hour sixteen, you know things are hitting their crux. He’s going to cave soon, or he’s going to blow, and so you don’t see Alex anymore. She’s working with her team to be in position for… whatever. 

It’s only when she’s gone that you realize that she’s been near you, awake and working and almost always somewhere in your peripheral vision, for this whole time.

Virtually everyone else, your whole crew and hers, has rotated out in shifts to sleep.

Eighteen hours in, you talk him down. He releases the hostages and walks out, and the DEO takes him into custody. 

You hand over the phone, your ears hot and red from so many hours of listening, your arms tired from holding it to your ears, and you collapse onto the tail of a tactical van.

“Hey.”

You look up. Alex is there, holding a blanket.

“Let’s get you home.”

They’re the first words she’s spoken to you in all of this, and you’re too exhausted to resist.

You let her wrap the blanket around your shoulders and guide you to the passenger side of a DEO sedan.

“Wait,” you say. “You’ve been up too. You need to go to bed also.”

“But I haven’t been working as hard as you have, Sawyer,” she says. “I’ll go home and sleep right after I drop you off.”

You don’t have the energy to argue, or ask questions.

“What’s your address?” she asks, from the driver’s seat, and you chuckle to yourself dumbly, because, god,  _ Alex Danvers _ , the love of your life so far,  _ doesn’t even know where you live _ .

You tell her, and she nods.

She pulls up in front of your building a few minutes later. Not much traffic at this hour of the morning.

You’re exhausted to the point of woozy, and Alex has spent the past eighteen hours reminding you how well she knows you, which is probably the only reason you bring it up.

“Alex,” you say. You rub at your eyes with thumb and forefinger.

“Yeah?”

“How’d things go with Vaya?”

You look at her. You can feel the weight of the bags under your eyes.

She furrows her brow at you. “Vaya…?”

“C’mon, Danvers. Tanalorian? Purple skin, green hair. Hard to forget.”

Her eyes widen in recognition. “Were you there? At the bar?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, Maggie.” Her fist clenches around the steering wheel. “That wasn’t… it wasn’t anything. We met when we were ordering drinks and she mentioned being new to the planet so I invited her to play some darts. She was nice and I was attracted to her, but I wasn’t — it didn’t even cross my mind to act on it, I wasn’t ready. But I guess she read it in me at the cellular level, you know how Tanalorians can see, and she just… pounced. And I’d been going through a lonely spell and so I just… went with it for a few minutes, before I stopped things and explained that this wasn’t the way seduction usually went with humans. I should never have let it happen at all, but especially not there, where I know you hang out. I’m…” she swallows audibly. “I’m really sorry.  _ Really _ sorry.”

You huff out a dry laugh at her earnestness. She means it, anyway. That much is obvious. “‘S okay, Danvers. Thanks.” And then, because you’re too exhausted and weak to keep the truth in at this twilight hour: “I tried to date her. Before you. I mean, after you, after us, but before I saw you kissing her. I put the ball in her court but she never called me back. So it stung a little to see her with you.”

A moment of silence hangs between you, and then:

She drops her head back against the headrest and laughs. “It was  _ you.” _

You furrow your eyebrows at her. “What?”

“She told me, after, that she’d met this human girl she liked, but that she hadn’t known how to take it to the next level and so things had just sort of... ended. She was definitely disappointed about it. She said she’d done some research into human courtship, mostly by watching movies, and that’s what had inspired her to, um, jump me. My words, not hers. I tried to talk her through how things actually tend to work in, you know, the world outside of rom-coms.”

You laugh a little and run your hand over your face. That sounds like Vaya: earnest, eager, kind, wanting to please.

“It was  _ you _ ,” Alex repeats. “The human she was into.”

You shrug. “I don’t know. I guess it might have been.”

Alex swallows. The silence sits around you.

“You, um,” Alex starts, “you should call her, if you’ve got her number. I bet she’d still be happy to hear from you.”

You laugh a little and shake your head, rolling it against the headrest. “You’d want to see me dating her? You’d be OK with seeing that?”

“I’d hate seeing that,” Alex says, and you suspect this is the exhaustion getting to her, too. “But that’s on me. I want you to be happy, and she seemed like a really sweet girl.”

Right, because  _ sweet _ is absolutely the kind of girl you should date.

Like  _ sweet _ would ever mesh well with everything sour and acidic about you.

You reach for the door handle. “Thanks for the ride, Danvers.”

“Least I could do,” she replies. “Text me when you get into your apartment so I know you’re okay?”

“Sure.”

She smiles tightly at you. Then she waits to see you enter the building before she drives away.

 

\--

 

**You (Today 4:57 AM):** I’m home.

**You (Today 4:57 AM):** Thanks for the ride.

**You (Today 4:57 AM):** And for everything else today. I appreciate it.

**Alex (Today 4:57 AM):** Any time, i was glad i could help

**Alex (Today 4:58 AM):** You were a badass out there today maggie

 

\--

 

For all these months, in moments of weakness, you’ve found yourself daydreaming, a bit, of the image of Alex holding a baby.

She doesn’t hold her in a basket-carry. She holds her with one arm, the small body propped against her chest, while the other hand does things: raids the fridge, looks things up on her phone, turns the pages on a journal article she’s reading.

If you’re half-asleep during these daydreams, you sometimes imagine yourself there, too.

“Hold her for me for a sec?” she asks you, and, frozen, you don’t refuse. You end up with a baby in your hands, held out awkwardly away from you.

She starts to scream.

You try to hush her. You pull her in against your body. She feels warm and soft, and you feel sharp and hard, and you worry that the angles of you will puncture her curves.

But then Alex comes back to you. She wraps you both up in her arms, together, and the baby stops crying when she feels Alex’s hand on her back.

Against your chest, she makes a soft sound, and you feel Alex smile against the side of your head.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made a tweeter, kids. Come find me @RoadieN60

 

After the hostage situation, you don’t seek Alex out, and she doesn’t seek you, but you encounter one another all the same in the usual places.

The next time you see each other at the bar, she calls out a greeting to you when she waves to you from across the bar. It’s all she says, and she doesn’t approach you, but it’s more public interaction than you’ve exchanged in that space since you broke up.

 

—

 

Alex starts dating someone.

You only know because you see them together at the bar, from afar. She’s tall and blonde and you can’t quite tell if she’s human or if she’s Ursinian, mostly because Ursinians are also very tall and blonde. 

They’re also able to reproduce with humans. Ursinian women can even reproduce with human women, as long as it’s started in vitro and the Ursinian carries the pregnancy.

They don’t make out at the bar. You appreciate that, after Vaya. But they touch each other softly, fondly. They stand close and share breath.

 

—

 

You date a Roltikkon named… well, you can’t pronounce her name, really. But on Earth, she goes by Terri.

She’s sweet, and funny, and ferociously attractive, and attentive. She’s good with her tongue — all Roltikkons are, according to Darla, so if a Roltikkon enjoys kissing you it’s really a testament to your exceptional oral skill by human standards — but Terri is  _ so _ good with hers that when she has it in your mouth, kissing you, you can’t help but fantasize a little about all the other things you’d like her to do to you with it. 

She’s more attentive than Darla was, though, because just a few days later, back in her apartment, she does  _ exactly _ the things you’d fantasized about during the kiss.

You’d never even had to talk to her about it.

You come so hard you white out. Twice. Then you do your best to rally and return the favor.

 

—

 

Winn confirms that Alex is dating an Ursinian.

Well, that’s perfect, you think.

After you find out,  you ask Winn to go out drinking with you because you’re going to drink over it and you’d rather not to that alone. 

Once you’ve recovered from your hangover, you decide to wish them well.

Not to actually tell them that. Just, you know, to wish it for them.

You  _ decide _ it.

 

—

 

Terri is the best sex you’ve ever had, in terms of pure physical gratification. You’ve never before been with someone who can make you come every single time, and she’s directive and responsive in all the ways you like when you take your turn to fuck her. 

Orgasms are different for Roltikkons than humans, in that it’s nearly impossible for a human to make a Roltikkon come because the act generally requires the use of a very long, moderately-prehensile tongue applied in a very particular way.

(Darla once told you that Gene Simmons’ tongue alteration was driven by a desire to hook up with a Roltikkon woman.)

But you have long fingers and you know what to do with them. You make Terri come twice during the eight weeks or so that you date her, and you feel pretty damn good about it, since she says they’re the only orgasms she’s ever had with a human.

But there’s not much there, besides the sex, for the two of you. You don’t have much to talk about. You try to discuss the future with her, once or twice, and it’s just awkward.

You break up. 

Terri starts dating Darla a few weeks later.

 

\--   
  


You’re getting a coffee at a place you’ve never been to, in a part of town you don’t visit much, when someone taps you on the shoulder.

“Maggie?” she says, “Is that you?”

You look over your shoulder at her.

She doesn’t look familiar: long black hair, square bangs, heavy makeup. Even at a glance, she looks, somehow, uncomfortable in her own skin. Like she’s trying too hard. Like she’s the physical embodiment of an apologetic wince.

You’d remember her, you know, because the overall air of awkwardness is, well, memorable.

Your confusion must show on your face, because:

“Sorry,” she says. She flips the length of her hair behind her shoulder. “It’s, um. It’s Vaya, I’m just, you know.” She gestures vaguely at herself. “Out.”

“Oh!” you gasp, your hand coming up to your mouth. You see it now, of course, you see  _ her _ under the wig and the theatrical quantities of olive-tinted face-paint, covering her green skin and purple hair. “Oh, hi! I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you!”

She’s so beautiful, but like this, so heavily concealed from the world, she looks nervous and unsettled and you hate that you live in a world that forces this upon people like her. 

Could we just smash all the closets, already?   


“How--how are you?” you ask. “Do you live around here?”

She nods. “I’m working the front desk at a real estate office down the road, so I got an apartment near by.”

It’s a nice neighborhood. You’re only here because you needed to interview someone about a case you’re working.

“That’s really great,” you say to her. “I’m so glad you found a place to work.”

Of course, she doesn’t have papers or a social security number, so finding a desk job, one that’s not totally menial and that pays under the table is a real find.

(It makes you think of Brian. Alex had been really short with him, at first, when she started realizing his gambling problems and his tendency to get himself into trouble that way. But you pointed out that gambling can be really appealing to people with limited access to funds: it carries this never-ending promise of striking it big, and for someone like Brian, who really can’t pass for human no matter how much makeup he’s wearing, the idea of a big score that will keep him financially secure for life is… really appealing.)

(She’d listened to you, like she always did. And she’d taken it to heart, like she always did. Whenever she needed to hire anyone for something small -- a messenger, some furniture assembly she didn’t have time to do herself, things like that -- you’d notice that she’d go out of her way to hire him.)

You’re standing there, awkwardly opposite Vaya, by the counter with the cream and sugar, trying to figure out what to do next.

“I’m -- it’s nice to see you, Vaya, I’m glad you’re doing well,” you say, hoping that’ll end the conversation and release you.

She smiles and nods. “Thank you. It’s nice to see you too.”

You bite your lip and smile a little. “I have to--” you gesture toward the door, behind her, and she shifts over a little, as though surprised, or embarrassed.

“Of course!” she says, still so apologetic.

You slip by her and are halfway to the door when she says, “Maggie?”

You turn. “Yeah?”

“Would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime?”

She says it quickly and squarely, like she’s practiced it.

It’s the most endearing thing you’ve seen all day, and it warms you from deep in your gut.

“Sure,” you say. You walk back toward her. “Let me, um--you got a phone?”

“I--yes, of course,” she says, and you can pick up the purplish tint of her blush under the makeup, just a little. She fishes a Samsung phone out of her bag and hands it to you. It takes a second for you to find the contacts list, you were never a Droid user, but when you do, you punch your number in.

“I’m free this whole weekend,” you say. “Just text me when and where to meet you?”

“Y--yeah,” she says, and she’s smiling so hard her cheeks might crack. “I will.” 

You go for dinner at a nice Szechuan fusion place that you’d heard of but never been to.

“The flavors remind me of Tanalor,” she says, as she holds the door open for you.

“Then you should order for us,” you say. “I’d love to try whatever tastes most like home for you.”

She orders a few vegetable dishes with different sauces and seasonings, and a plate of steamed pork dumplings. 

“The dumplings don’t taste anything like Tanalorian food,” she says, “they’re just delicious.” 

The food is great, and Vaya is still lovely. It’s really the word for her: ‘lovely,’ which implies something light, and pretty, and desirable, and that makes you smile. She approaches life on Earth with a kind of wide-eyed, open-hearted wonderment. She’s gotten into baseball, you learn, and proceeds to tell you more about the National City Hammers than you ever wanted to know. But she makes you care, somehow: her energy is infectious.

“Next time,” you say, “let’s go to a WNBA game.”

Her eyes light up. At first you think it’s about sports -- then you realize it’s because you just, effectively, promised her a second date.

While you’re sipping tea, after your meal, a short, stocky woman old enough to be your mother comes to your table. She’s wearing a white chef’s coat dotted with splashes of sauce and oil.

“Vaya!” she says, her arms open in greeting, “I did not recognize you! You should have had Yenzhen tell me you were here! I would have sent you something special -- do you want dessert? I will send you some dessert.”

She has a thick Chinese accent, but Vaya has no trouble following it. Yenzhen was your server.

“Qian,” Vaya says happily, “this is my -- this is Maggie. Maggie, this is Qian, she owns the restaurant.”

You exchange greetings and pleasantries, and thank her for the delicious food. She smiles at you, tipping her head in the slightest nod of gratitude for the compliment.

“Vaya,” she says finally, “you shouldn’t dress like this when you come here. In my restaurant, you can always be you.”

She’s gesturing at Vaya’s wig and makeup.

Vaya ducks her chin a little, her eyes flitting back and forth between you and Qian, and she plays with the strands of her wig.

Qian heads back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later Yenzhen emerges with two small cups of saffron and plum rice pudding. “From the chef, on the house,” she says.

Vaya explains to you that Qian was the first human she’d met who understood what it was like to come to a new place to try to find a better life. She volunteers at a refugee center -- and that was where Vaya met her. Qian had always told her that she was free to come to the restaurant as herself, without makeup or wigs, and that anyone who gave her trouble would be asked to leave.

“She’s been very successful with her restaurant,” Vaya says, shrugging, “she can afford to take that gamble with her business.”

Later, she walks you to your bike. From there, she’ll flag down a cab to get home.

“Vaya,” you ask, “if that restaurant was safe for aliens, why did you -- why did you choose to wear makeup and the wig?”

It’s late, and the makeup has thinned. You can see patches of mauve at the crinkles near her eyes. 

She shrugs. “I thought you might -- that it would be… after last time, with us...”

She trails off, but you understand.

She thought you’d find her more attractive if she looked more human.

“Vaya, you’re beautiful,” you say. “You don’t need to hide yourself for me. Okay?”

“Okay,” she breathes, and smiles.

You reach the bike, and you turn to face her.

“Vaya,” you say.

She nods.

“I’d like to kiss you,” you offer.

She smiles, soft and bright, and nods again. 

She tips her head down toward yours, and you tip yours up, and even with the makeup, the kiss is sweet, and soft, and comfortable.

 

\--

 

Your next date is sweet, and soft, and comfortable, and the one after that. You wrap yourself in Vaya’s earnest good nature, in her deeply-ingrained, if sometimes nervous, kindness, and it warms you better than a blanket, better than scotch. A younger you, fresh out of your relationship with Emily and still without Alex anywhere near your horizon, would have scoffed at the image of yourself with someone like Vaya: someone so straightforward, with her heart on her sleeve and nothing hidden up it. You would have thought her boring. Vanilla. 

You realize, a few weeks in, when this has truly become a  _ relationship _ , that this is the first time you can remember dating anyone where you’re not haunted by lingering feelings of inadequacy. You are enough for her; she is proud, maybe even  _ honored _ , to be with you. 

Having an alien girlfriend is always a little strange, because each alien has different powers and norms and has acclimatized differently to human life. Vaya, you discover, has developed a pretty passionate love for earthen plant life. You’re eating lunch together in a park near your precinct, one day, when she tugs you toward a tree with a chink in its bark. 

“It’s beautiful,” she says, “the way the cells knit back together. I wish you could see it.” 

When you decide to mark your one-month anniversary with a night out, she meets you at the restaurant with a “bouquet” of tall grasses and leafy weeds and not a single flower.

“I know it’s not conventional,” she says, “but if you could just… if you could see these like I do, if you could see the interactions of the cells and the lattice they create to build the plants… to me, they’re so much more beautiful than a bouquet of roses, and -- and so are you, Maggie.”

You kiss her deeply, thoroughly, right there in the restaurant, and when the waiter comes to the table, you ask him for water to put the bouquet in. He looks at you like you might have a screw loose but you just smile back at him, sweetly, until he nods and leaves to find you a cup.

The next morning, you make her a veggie omelet, but you stir-fry the vegetables in soy sauce and hoisin first, because that’s the kind of flavor palette that gives her a taste of home.

She devours it, and then drags you back to bed and devours  _ you _ . 

It’s perfect.

_ She’s _ perfect.

You’ve been dating for about three weeks when you do something you haven’t done since… college, probably:

You introduce her to your friend.

You meet Winn at the bar first and have Vaya meet you both there a half-hour later. Winn leans forward over the table and grins at you, rubbing his palms together.

“Okay!” he says, “So how do we do this? Am I supposed to be, like, tough-guy friend? ‘You better be nice to my friend, or else!’ or am I like, nice-guy friend? ‘So, Vaya, tell me all about  _ you _ !’ Or should I just talk about how great you are?”

You can’t help but chuckle at him. You’ve gotten to know him well enough to understand that this persona of social haplessness is just that: a persona. By pretending to be a little ditzy, a little perplexed by social norms, he’s able to distance himself from mistakes or actual accidental offenses he might make. It’s an excuse, really, but only in the way excuses can also be armor.

“You don’t need to…  _ do _ anything in particular, Winn. I just want you to meet her.”

It warms you, though, that he’s sitting beside you, offering to give a shovel talk on your behalf. For one thing, Winn Schott scores a negative on the intimidation scale. But for another: the last time you had someone want to threaten a girlfriend for you was in college, your old roommate.

You lost touch with her after you graduated, for no real reason beyond your apparent inability to sustain relationships.

Not for the first time, you swear that Winn will be different. That Winn picked you out of the crowd and  _ chose _ you, even when you made it hard for him, and you won’t make the same mistake you’ve made before when people have cared about you.

He grins broadly, and then playfully flashes a salute. “Just meet her, got it. Be nice, make friends, as long as she’s not a jerk, in which case I will not be quiet about it, because you do not deserve to date a jerk.”

The evening goes well. Vaya is sweet and disarming, and charms Winn effortlessly. It doesn’t seem to occur to her to be nervous about it.

But the line about dating jerks sticks with you. You find yourself wondering if he intends it as a dig at Alex.

You hope not. Because Alex is flawed, sure, as Winn is, and you are, and all people are. She’s a bit of a jerk, yes -- but that’s part of what you’ve always liked about her: how unapologetic she is, unless there’s a real reason to apologize, in which case she  _ always _ does. She  _ commits _ . Wholeheartedly. 

Sometimes too fast. Sometimes a little foolishly.

Sometimes the fallout hurts people.

But most of the time it’s that commitment, that confidence, that saves lives.

(And brings stars to your eyes.)

 

\--

 

You’ve been with Vaya about eight weeks when you hit the one-year anniversary of the day you were supposed to get married.

It’s funny: the wedding date itself slid by last year, subsumed by the overall tide of grief that was your day-to-day life at that point.

The anniversary of the breakup slid over you like an anaesthetic. It happened while you were dating Terri, toward the end, and you spent the day feeling functional but sort of numb, like things were moving sluggishly between your brain and the rest of your body.

Somehow it’s the anniversary of your would-be wedding day that’s the first one that hits you like a ton of bricks.

You wake up that morning beside a sweet, loving girl who is not Alex, and for an irrational flash of a moment, you  _ hate _ her for it -- not Alex, but Vaya. And then it passes, but you know that means you need to take yourself away from her to avoid saying or doing something that you’ll regret tomorrow.

You’ve told Vaya about Alex by this point, of course, but you don’t draw her attention to the anniversary. Instead, you get up early and beat the shit out of the punching bag at the precinct before work. Then you spend your day doing paperwork -- which isn’t great for mental distraction but you know your limits and the odds are a little too good that you’ll take your emotions out on some unwitting suspect or witness if you go out today. You leave work a little early and ride your bike for hours, not toward the beach which will always remind you of Alex, but out into the desert and the mountains.

You silence your phone for the ride, and spend most of it in areas without signal anyway. You can’t talk to anyone -- not Winn, who probably knows what anniversary it is, and certainly not Vaya, who doesn’t need to be burdened with your baggage when she’s working so hard to be everything you could ever need.

(Vaya is upset when you finally return her texts that evening.

“I’m not clingy,” she insists, and you know it’s true: she’s not. “But we’re usually in touch after work, so if you suddenly don’t respond and I don’t know why, it’s fair for me to be worried. You know your job can be dangerous.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” you murmur into her neck, “rough day, I just needed to be by myself with it so I wouldn’t take it out on you.” 

She forgives you. Because of course she does. Even though you know you were inconsiderate.

It’s not until later, when she’s asleep beside you, that you realize that you called her “sweetie,” and the realization keeps you up late into the night.)

Vaya is so accommodating, so flexible, so open-hearted, that you find her hard to trust sometimes.

You ask her about it frequently, because you have a hard time wrapping your head around her response, which is always something like:

“I pick my fights, Maggie, and most of them just aren’t worth choosing.”

But it’s unnerving, to feel like she doesn’t  _ want _ anything, that she doesn’t have any demands for how she wants you to treat her.

“What do you know about Tanalor, Maggie?” she asks you, when you’re eating yakisoba takeout together on her sofa.

You shrug. “Not much. Far side of the Milky Way, right? Highly stratified societies?”

“ _ Highly _ stratified, yes,” she says. “It varied a lot from place to place, you know. Ours is a heavily populated planet, just like Earth, with an enormous diversity of cultures. But our caste system has become near-universal, like your gender system here on Earth. Powerful cultures established rules that governed each of the eleven castes, with caste determined by the mark on our skin here,” she reaches over and presses the tips of her fingers to your sternum, above your breasts but below your collarbone.

You know that she has a mark there, a natural puckering of the skin shaped like a chevron.

“And then those powerful cultures imposed those values on others. Other people, other cultures. There used to be places on the planet where the mark was just a mark, of no real value, like the specific tint of your hair color. But four, five generations ago, that disappeared. And my caste became the bottom one: the foulest of the foul.”

She tells you a story, then: the story of her life on Tanalor, a horrific tale of abuse at the hands of a determinist, oligarchical government system.

She tells you of a child she had. You never knew she’d had one. The child wasn’t a boy or a girl, just as she herself isn’t really; Tanalor has seventeen gender-names and a well-established capacity to combine those names for anyone who doesn’t align well with one of the seventeen. “Female” works well enough for her here on Earth, but she will not assign a human gender to her child, for whom the categories are not relevant.

The child went out into their village to buy food and was murdered for sport by members of an upper caste. 

The murderers’ families had known well that they’d never be punished for killing a member of Vaya’s caste, but they wanted to spare themselves the hassle of the accusation. So in exchange for Vaya’s silence, they’d offered off-world transport to Earth for her and her brother.

“And so we went,” she says, “and to this day, I don’t know if it was the right decision, not to stay and fight for the memory of my child. But I would have lost. People of my caste, they die all the time of curable diseases because the doctors won’t treat us. Nobody cares if one of us dies. This way, I thought, at least I could be safe, and my younger sibling could be safe.” 

You shift closer to her, run your fingers through her soft hair. “I don’t think anyone with a heart would judge you for the decision you made,” you say.

“Perhaps,” she shrugs. “But I just… I think of that decision, the decision to walk away from that murder and come here, I think of the taunting and humiliation and violence I lived with every day, there, and by comparison, so little seems worth getting upset about.”

Except when you don’t answer your texts for an evening, you think.

But suddenly that’s thrown into sharp relief: her child was killed on a simple trip out to the market, one evening, away from her. How would she have known of the death? How long did it take to make its way back to her?

You vow to yourself to always, always warn her before you go dark, and to tell her when you’ll be back online again.

 

\--

 

You’re having a drink with Vaya and Winn at the bar one evening when the inevitable happens.

It starts with Vaya spotting a friend who walks in alone, and waving him over to join you.

She ducks close to your ear. “I can tell he’s had a rough day,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind?”

Of course you don’t mind.

You’ve met him once or twice, a Kruvite--non-gang-affiliated--named Strek’a, “But you can call me Trek.” He’s a humanoid mountain: six and a half feet tall, arms the girth of an oil barrel, chest the breadth of a bull’s.

It turns out his human girlfriend dumped him.

“I think she, like wanted me to be this kind of alpha-male,” he says sadly, “they look at me and they always do. But I’m never going to be that way.”

This, you’ve learned, is the irony of Kruvite life: they are prone to anger, and even to fits of violence, but they also highly prize those who have the capability to contain and manage those impulses. So their planet seems to export both great violence and great wisdom.

Trek has told you he meditates at least twice every day, for at least half an hour each time.

Vaya buys him a shot of Aldebaraan rum, and he seems to enjoy the company, and you were just out having a chill evening with the people you care most about, so you don’t at all mind him joining you.

After an hour or so, you excuse yourself to go to the restroom. Your phone buzzes in your pocket while you’re washing your hands:

 

\--

 

**Winn (8:31 pm)** : oh no oh no SOS SOS

 

\--

You run outside with the paper towel still in your hands, prepared for -- you don’t know. Another attack on the bar? Supergirl dancing on a table and blowing her cover? What? But at first, everything seems normal. You slip your phone back into your pocket and wipe your still-slightly-damp hands on your jeans.

People have shifted around your table, and you can see from Winn’s profile that he’s got his forehead wrinkled up the way he does when he’s nervous about something.

You take two steps further so you can see the rest of the table as it appears around the edge of the bar and you see Alex and her Ursinian girlfriend sitting there, chairs scooted up and space made for them like they don’t plan to go anywhere soon.

Well, fuck.

This is… okay. You can do this. You’re an adult. It’s been over a  _ year _ . You can  _ do this _ .

But first, you duck back around to the side of the bar where they’re less likely to see you, and you flag down the bartender and order a shot of well whiskey. You slam it and then tell him to put it on Alex’s tab.

(You’d like to see her try to get mad at you over it.)

Then, liquid courage hot at the back of your throat, you return to your seat, which you scoot a little closer than necessary to Vaya, and then put a hand on her thigh. She glows at you; she’s always loved it when you’re affectionate with her outside your apartment. 

(She doesn’t understand why you can’t always hold her hand or touch her with casual intimacy in public, even when she’s in her human disguise.

She comes from a planet with almost no concept of gender, which also means no concept of anything like homophobia.)

“Maggie,” Trek says, “this is my friend Ora, and her girlfriend Alex.”

You can  _ do _ this.

“Nice to meet you, Ora,” you say to the Ursinian. Then, to Alex: “I… Alex, hi. How’s the FBI?”

Alex is looking at you wide-eyed, a haunted combination of terror and embarrassment etched clearly in her expression.

“It’s, um, it’s good,” Alex says, “How’s the NCPD?”

“Oh, hey,” Trek says, “you two know each other? Sweet!”

“We’ve met,” you say.

You look over at Winn who looks like he wants to tunnel a hole into the floor and fall into it.

He  _ did _ try to warn you, you suppose, though next time he could potentially use Alex’s name in his SOS text.

Suddenly, you feel Vaya tense up under your hand and you realize: oh, she just  _ got _ it.

But this doesn’t have to be weird. It’s been over a year, you’re both happy with new people. 

To Trek, you smile and say, “Yeah, we’ve fought over a crime scene or two.” 

Alex, thankfully, takes your cue. You see her shoulders relax a bit in your peripheral vision. “Fighting over jurisdiction was practically our hobby for awhile,” she says, laughing a little. “We’ve gotten better at sharing over the years, eh, Schott?”

Winn, who’s desperately trying not to look like a puppy torn between his two favorite toys, tries for humor by saying, “Well, I know I’m probably not supposed to say this, but Director Henshaw sometimes farms things off to Maggie and the NCPD if he wants someone to actually talk to people and he’s afraid you’ll just punch them.”

“Ooooh,” Alex hisses, “touché!” But she’s laughing at it.

When on earth did Alex acquire the ability to laugh at herself?

But you have, together, achieved what you think you both want: this motley group of people that you care about are able to continue to enjoy each other’s company, even with both of you there. 

You have succeeded in Not Making It Awkward.

It’s  _ nice _ . Vaya leans over at one point, when the group is chatty enough that she can whisper without being overheard, and she says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t put together that  _ that _ was  _ your _ Alex. I would have -- I could have stopped --”

“It’s okay,” you say to her. “It’s actually… it’s  _ good _ .”

Because you’ve interacted with Alex comfortably over this table. You’ve joked a little, bantered over the National City Galaxy WNBA prospects (you think they should draft a center from Tennessee, but Alex has her eye on some hot-shot point guard from UConn, and your main takeaway is that Alex has retained the interest in women’s basketball that you instilled in her when you were dating). Vaya, kind Vaya, just seems happy that you’re happy, but you don’t miss that Ora might, in fact, be visualizing what it would look like if you dropped dead right now, this second, on the table-top.

(Ursinians are fiercely monogamous and prone to extreme jealousy.)

(That’s Alex’s problem, not yours.)

 

\--

 

**Winn (10:04 pm):** omg that was impressive. You’re the best. Thank you for handling that so well.

 

\--

 

**Alex (10:28 pm)** : I’m sorry, with Winn and Vaya there I guessed that must be your table but I couldn’t figure out how to get out of it

**Alex (10:28 pm):** But that was good, right? 

**You (10:28 pm):** It’s okay, Danvers. Yeah, it was good.

**Alex (10:29 pm):** good. It was nice to hang out with you

**You (10:31 pm):** It was nice to hang out with you, too.

 

**Alex (10:41 pm)** : PS, you owe me a shot of whiskey, you twerp ;)

 

\--

 

**You (draft):** I miss you

**You (draft):** Maybe we could  ~~hang out do~~ ~~ that again ~~   ~~try to~~

 

\--

 

**Deleted** :

~~**You (draft):** I miss you ~~

~~**You (draft):** Maybe we could hang out do that again try to ~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments and kudos give me LIFE. I'm super behind on replying to them but I'll catch up, I promise!
> 
> Protip, though: If you don't like a fic, don't tell the author about it. Complain about it with your friends if you want, on social media or on your blog or in your discussion forums or whatever, that's cool. But there is literally no reason to leave a comment telling an author you don't like their story. Questions, clarifications, continuity issues? Sure, let me know. But if you just flat-out don't like the story, you're free to close the tab and not tell me about it.
> 
> I'm in a line of work that involves taking a LOT of criticism, so really, your petty flames will sting me for a minute but beyond that IDGAF.
> 
> But that's the kind of crap that will make less-jaded writers give up instead of working to improve. Fanfic authors don't owe our audiences much of anything besides appropriate tagging. We do this for fun, and to escape pressures of daily life. When you shit on our stories in our comments, you literally just shit on our escapist fun in front of us, and that makes you a dick.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm SO BEHIND on answering comments, I'm sorry, guys, I'll catch up!
> 
> This chapter is very, very NSFW. I don't think I'd call it smut so much as... strong sex? Featuring some light bondage that's very soft, imo, even though it's also intense. (And yes, it's a Sanvers scene.)

After that time with the group, when you see Alex at the bar, you stop at each other’s tables, sometimes. You say hi.

One evening, you arrive there alone to see Alex drinking alone.

And Alex does drink to drown her stressors, she always has, but rarely alone. And when she does drink alone, she usually does it at home, on her couch, where, in her words, the good scotch comes pre-paid.

When Alex drinks alone, it’s never over a work problem, except in the rare circumstances where J’onn orders her out of the DEO due to some violation or other, because work problems don’t inspire her to drink, they inspire her to stay at work for absurd numbers of hours until the problems are solved.

There are three general reasons for Alex to drink alone: Kara, Jeremiah...

And her girlfriend.

Something about the idea that her girlfriend might not be her girlfriend anymore tightens your stomach in… something.

But none of them explain why she’s drinking at the bar.

You buy yourself a beer and, before you can talk yourself out of it, plunk yourself into the stool on the opposite side of the tall table where she’s sitting. Her eyes startle up from her half-drunk beer (beer, you think, that’s also a bit out of character for this kind of drinking) and widen in surprise at the sight of you. Her mouth opens, closes, opens again, looking for words she can’t find.

“You waiting for someone?” you ask, even though you can tell by her body language that she isn’t.

She half-hitches one shoulder and then looks down into her drink again. “No.”

You hum, and then hitch forward a bit over the table, hands wrapped around your beer. “Your girlfriend, your sister, or your dad,” you say.

She looks up at you with tired eyes. “What?”

You try to smile at her. To be non-threatening. “Unless something really drastic has changed in your life, those are the three people that could drive you to drink alone.”

She huffs out a little laugh. “Am I that predictable?”

“No,” you shrug, “but there was a time when we spent a lot of time together, so I picked up some of your patterns.”

You hope the joke will fly.

She half-smiles, eyes flitting up at the ceiling with a resigned, but good-natured, nod. So you push on:

“One of those people is outside my wheelhouse,” you say, “but I’m read in on the other two, if you want to talk about them.”

Her eyes linger on you, on yours, again, and she purses her lips and squints a little, as though she’s trying to see into your skull, or as though she’s trying to puzzle out your ulterior motives.

“I don’t,” she finally says. “But maybe… I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind the distraction, if you want to talk about something else, maybe?”

“Sure, Danvers.” You sip your beer and rack your brain, because nothing makes for a worse conversation-starter than for someone to ask you to, you know, start a conversation. “Oh!” you say, finally, “I watched  _ Midnight Sun _ after you recommended it, that night.”

She brightens at that. “You did! What did you think?”

“You were right,” you say, “brilliant writing, great acting. The spook factor’s off the charts, but yeah, someone on the writing staff must have some experience with Hellgrammites to have written the forest-demons like that.”

“Okay, between us?” Alex says, leaning forward a little conspiratorially, “The DEO may or may not have started keeping an eye on their writers and showrunners. Just to make sure we know how much they know. Oh, and some of their effects team.”

You blink at her, and blink again, and shake your head. “Due process doesn’t mean shit to you guys, does it?”

She smirks and shakes her head, wagging her finger at you. “Now, now. It just means something  _ different _ to us. Everyone gets the process that they’re due.”

It’s a familiar debate, one you’ve bickered over countless times and actually fought about once or twice. This was always something you had to wrap your head around, when you were together: that your philosophies of criminal justice were different, and that you would likely never see exactly eye-to-eye on them. You pride yourself on having drawn her further over in your direction than she could draw you in hers.

You chat easily. So easily, you can almost forget that this is the woman who broke your heart and left you without even a broom and dustpan to sweep up the pieces. 

Maybe you can be friends, you think. Maybe this is the beginning of some new stage in your lives opposite one another, parallel but entangled, like strands in a double-helix.

(You’re pretty sure she’s woven herself into your DNA. Like a virus, she’ll be in your system forever. But if you’re going to carry that metaphor forward: you’ve built antibodies over the past more-than-a-year without her. Surely the symptoms have reduced by now.)

An hour passes. It’s late. You haven’t talked about anything substantial, and you keep the table between you. But finally, Alex glances down at her watch, and then meets your eyes.

“It’s getting late. I should probably head home to sleep.”

You nod, and smile, and it’s not even hard to do. “Sure, Danvers.” You hold out a hand for her glass, and it suddenly occurs to you that in all the time you’ve been sitting here, neither of you has ordered a second drink.

You take the glasses to the bar and expect her to be gone when you turn around, but she’s not. She’s standing there, waiting for you, her bike helmet dangling from her hand.

She bites her lip and says, “I was drinking alone here because it keeps me from being stupid.”

You furrow your eyebrows at her. “Um -- okay?”

“If I drink alone at home when I’m upset about something, I tend to drink a lot,” she says.

You know this. You’ve stopped her more than once.

“But if I come here, and I bring my bike, I know I won’t have more than one drink or maybe two with food, because I have to drive home.” She chuckles a little, self-deprecatingly. “Sometimes I don’t care about the chance that I might get hurt. Sometimes I don’t even care that I might hurt other people, to be honest. I mean, of course I care, I would never do it, but -- anyway, I’d never do anything that might hurt my bike.”

It’s not really an explanation for why she’s here drinking, of course, just like “To get to the other side” doesn’t really explain why a chicken would cross a road. But you smile at her anyway.

“Just don’t do anything to get yourself pulled over when I’m the last person you were seen with, okay? I’d never live it down at the precinct.”

She smiles at you, warm but tight. “I’m good to drive, Maggie. I wouldn’t drive if I weren’t.”

You smile at her and nod but it doesn’t feel natural. You imagine yourself pinching your face at her, constipated-looking, but she looks at you like your face looks natural, so. Maybe it’s fine.

You wonder, again, why she came here, really.

You wonder if it’s petty that you hope she broke up with her girlfriend.

 

\--

 

You’ve found yourself with a girlfriend who almost never loses her patience or her temper. Who is always kind, and often regretful of minor missteps and missed opportunities, and earnest in her desire to do better next time, every time, even when this time was good enough.

It makes you feel like an ass when you scream your road rage at some tech-bro douchebag in a convertible who cuts you off in traffic at the end of a crappy workday.

It makes you feel like an even bigger ass when you think back to that time you cheated on Emily. 

You did it because you were unhappy in the relationship. You wanted it to end, but she didn’t, and you weren’t brave enough to call it off, because she loved you, she  _ loved _ you, and who the fuck had ever loved you longer and harder than you loved them? And in some corner of your addled brain, you’d decided it would be a better idea to screw everything up so that she could feel  _ good _ about walking away from you.

It was to save you from breaking her heart.

Of course, you just broke it into a million more pieces than you would have if you’d just called off the relationship like a normal person. But no: instead, you had to fuck the associate communications director for the Mayor’s office on her desk in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight with the blinds open on her third-floor office.

You were still just a beat cop at the time. You were hand-delivering some memo from the brass on changes to parking enforcement strategies, and somehow, twenty minutes later, you were slipping your hand up her skirt and she was unbuttoning your uniform shirt to smear lipstick across your chest.

It was like something out of the worst straight guy take on a lesbian porn film, honestly. And it was so, so not worth wrecking Emily -- sweet, smart, beautiful Emily -- over. 

(You couldn’t get the lipstick off all the way without showering. So you made sure to tell Emily what had happened before she could find out the more brutal, visual way.)

It was true, what you told Alex. That in the fight where Emily walked out of your shared apartment, she told you that you didn’t deserve to be happy.

But what you didn’t tell Alex was that in that moment, Emily was right.

In that moment you didn’t deserve to be happy.

You think that maybe, under the right circumstances, you and happiness will find each other again.

But after six months with Vaya -- six sweet, non-confrontational, warmth-infused months with an alien who doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to fight -- you realize you can’t handle that kind of pure happiness. You need to be allowed to be angry. It took you years of growing and working and stressing over it to learn to be angry after your parents kicked you out -- to learn that anger wasn’t something to always be suppressed and contained. Anger is okay sometimes. Healthy, even.

You need to fight. You need someone who pushes back, who asserts herself against you when she needs to. Because without that tension, it feels like you have nothing to lean on, nothing to hold you up. 

You need  _ boundaries _ , and Vaya isn’t going to set them, and without them, you realize, you feel like you’re drifting. And drifting is scary and exhausting.

Vaya deserves someone who can appreciate her kindness and her light for every ounce of its beauty. She deserves someone who doesn’t distrust anything in this world that isn’t at least knee-deep in darkness.

Breaking up with her is the most heartbreaking thing you’ve ever done. Even worse than with Alex, because, well, Alex was the one who broke up with  _ you _ . This one, though. This one is squarely on your shoulders. 

Vaya cries. But even on this, even when she’s so clearly devastated, she doesn’t fight you.

 

\--

 

You have a history of serial monogamy but not this time, you decide. No flings. No relationships. You’re going to focus on yourself for awhile -- isn’t that what the self-help gurus say? You’re going to up your yoga classes to three a week and you’re going to go running regularly and you’re going to eat clean and drink less and plan yourself some kind of adventure vacation for next summer that will ideally involve climbing a mountain somewhere. 

It’ll be like Eat, Pray, Love, minus the praying and the loving. And a lot of the eating, honestly.

So maybe it’ll be nothing like Eat, Pray, Love? It’s not like you’ve read that book.

...maybe the first thing you should do, in this new embracing of self-care and the single life, is read Eat, Pray, Love. Didn’t the writer make headlines for being with a woman a few years ago? It’s not that that matters, necessarily, except insofar as it gives you one small commonality to start from.

So you try. You open the book to the Introduction and roll your eyes at the fact that it has three,  _ three _ , titles, only one of which is “Introduction.” Then the opening line talks about travelling in India through holy sites and that’s it, you’re done.

(Yoga is one thing. Getting on board with some white lady celebrating the Inherent Spiritual Magic of Brown People is something else entirely, and fuck that.)

 

\--

 

“You remember what I said to you back when we first became friends,” Winn asks. 

You’re at a ramen bar grabbing a bite after work. It’s the kind of thing you do with him lately to keep yourself from going home and letting yourself be lonely or, in this new lifestyle you’re developing, going to the bar for a beer. 

You think back.  _ We know things they’ll never understand. I’m saying I want to be your family. _

You crack a smile at him. “You said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with the gun, Sawyer, be nice to my controller?’”

He chuckles. “Okay, yes, but that’s because there wasn’t anything wrong with the gun.”

“Nice try, Schott, you know you replaced that controller by the next time we played.” 

“I replaced it because  _ you broke it from jamming on the trigger too hard.” _

_ “ _ I jammed on the trigger because _ it wasn’t working!” _

“It worked fine before you used it!”

You’re laughing together, gesturing with your chopsticks, and he waves his hand in the air dismissively. “ _ Anyway _ . No, not that.”

“Okay,” you say, “then what?”

“I mentioned that sometimes I wish I’d never had parents. That I feel like they did me more harm than good.”

You nod. You hadn’t agreed with him verbally, but in your mind, in your heart, you’d felt that way too, sometimes, over the years.

“I was thinking about that more recently,” he says. “I was thinking about, like, parenthood.”

Oh, God, you think. Why this, why now?

Why do parent issues and baby issues seem to follow you everywhere?

“Okay,” you say.

“I just realized that it’s not true, that I wish I’d never had parents,” he says.

You have no idea where he’s going, and it’s becoming a little annoying. You cover yourself by looking down and pulling another bite of noodles out of your bowl.

“It’s not that I wish I never had parents,” Winn repeats. “I didn’t want to grow up alone. I just wish I’d had parents that didn’t suck.”

Your eyes flit up again, and he’s stopped eating, his chopsticks hovering over his bowl.

He eyes you with surprising intensity, but no malice. It’s like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. “I just…” he inhales sharply, and then looks away. “I went into the system and I had all kinds of parents for a long time. And I just wish, when I’d think back, that I could ever, even once, have had parents that didn’t suck.” 

 

\--

 

You wonder, sometimes, if it’s a coincidence or a cosmic joke that over and over again, you’ve dated women with baggage associated with children. Not Terri, you suppose, but “dating” is a pretty loose term for what you had with her. But Vaya. And Jane. And, of course, Alex.

You don’t want kids. You’ve never wanted kids. You think of Vaya and Jane and how much misery children brought into their lives, how much suffering.

You think of Vaya, who was probably doing well as a parent before the universe fucked it all up for her.

You think of Jane, who wanted so badly to be good for her kids but had been taught by her own shitty mother to think of them as needing to fear the power she had over them.

You think of Alex, who would take a bullet to protect someone she loves -- who would take a bullet to protect any innocent whatsoever, if she could.

“I want to be a mom,” Alex said. Never, “I want to be a mother” -- always a  _ mom _ . It was never about, you know, status, or social pressure, or a particular vision of adulthood, for her. It was about wanting a particular kind of relationship with someone. About wanting to be a leader and a teacher and a protector and a giver of love and stability for someone who  _ needed  _ it.

It wasn’t about being a parent. It was about wanting to share the kind of love that only a mother and child can share.

You had that, once. People who wanted to be that for you. And then fourteen happened, and you fell into puppy love, and everything you knew about what it meant to be a parent crashed headlong through a window and tore itself apart on the broken glass.

You and Winn, you didn’t fuck up being kids, but your parents hurt you anyway.

But now sometimes... sometimes, you imagine yourself providing some kid with everything you so desperately craved as a teenager, and the mental image does something inside you, lifting your diaphragm.

You’ve never really wanted a kid, but if you had one, you’d be a fucking good parent. Your kid could murder someone and go to prison and you’d still be there for them.

Maybe you’re just recasting old regrets. Maybe you’re blaming yourself for your loneliness -- you’re good at that.

But you wonder, sometimes, if your reluctance to even consider children with Alex, your reluctance to try to meet her on her end after she very clearly tried so hard to meet you on yours, had nothing to do with children at all.

You wonder if it was just fear -- if it was deep, knee-shaking, bone-filling terror -- that you’d have to watch Alex fail a child the same way your parents failed you.

 

\--

 

You see Alex with Ora at the bar, leaning toward one another over a high bar table and speaking in serious tones.

Well. You still don’t know why Alex was drinking alone, but it apparently wasn’t a breakup.

You thought about asking Winn about it. You considered it very, very seriously. You knew that he probably knew what Alex was drinking about that day, too. But at the end of the day you wouldn’t violate Alex’s privacy like that, or put Winn in that terrible middle position of having to decide how to align his loyalties.

You leave the bar go home and do pushups until your shoulders give out and then you sign up for a sunrise yoga class the next day. Then you sign Winn up too, and then you text him and tell him to meet you there.

He texts you back a string of emojis related to sleep and the sun and generally being unhappy, which you know means that he’ll be there.

You’re very proud of the fact that you do not,  _ do not _ , drink scotch.

 

\--

 

The ascetic life doesn’t suit you. Six weeks of this shit and, yeah, your body looks pretty great in the mirror, but you crave Mexican food like every other day and are tired of being noble around the cookies and donuts in the precinct break room and… okay. You’re horny. Like, all the time. Which feels unfair, because you’ve gone much longer than six weeks without sex in the past -- you’ve gone months, a year, without it, and it’s been fine.

But something about making it intentional, about deciding, specifically, that you’re not going to get involved with anyone, makes you crave intimacy, physical contact, anything.  You find yourself noticing women in a way that you don’t, usually. They turn your head on the sidewalk, occupy your mind when it should be focusing on other things. You wear out the batteries on your vibrator over and over. You go online and buy a couple books of lesbian erotica, just to save your imagination from having to do all the work.

(Sometimes if you let your imagination do all the work, it conjures up images, memories, of people you shouldn’t be thinking of, that way, anymore.)

You’re such a teenage ball of raging hormones that one night, when you’re at the bar, some guy starts flirting with you, and he’s nice and reasonably attractive by guy standards and for a fleeting moment that should have been even more fleeting, _you actually consider flirting more with him_ _to see where it goes_.

You don’t. Because you don’t actually want him. You want sex, but you want sex for the sake of sex. You want sex for the way it means you can command someone’s attention, to the exclusion of all other distractions, for awhile, and have your attention commanded in the same way.

 

\--

 

When your mind wanders, when it’s allowed to think about sex on its own, it takes you back to the night of your thirtieth birthday: the only birthday that you spent with Alex.

It was after Valentine’s day, and before the tank. You know this, because you hadn’t yet told Alex you loved her: you’d rolled it around in your head, the idea of the feelings, but you hadn’t spoken them aloud. But you know it was after Valentine’s day, not only because of, well, the fact that your birthday’s in April, but also because the evening wound up involving lingerie.

When the dust settled over your lone, disastrous Valentine’s day together, a peripheral realization made its way to the center of your brain:

Alex was wearing silk.

She was waiting for you, wearing a fucking  _ negligée _ , hiding in the bathroom, with music on.

She was going to  _ make an entrance _ .

She was going to… what? Give you a striptease? A lapdance? God,  _ both _ ?

And you regret a lot of how that evening went, even though you talked it through with Alex later, and she did a pretty great job of making you feel like you didn’t have anything to apologize for. You regretted a lot about it but the thing your monkey-brain regretted most was missing whatever would have happened if the evening had progressed the way she’d wanted it to.

A week later, when the raw feelings had died down, after you’d called in about twenty-five favors from everyone you knew to make Alex’s prom happen, after you’d spent an evening slow dancing and kissing and eating chocolate-covered berries and realizing how deep, how far, how hard you were falling, you asked her:

_ What would have happened that night, if I hadn’t stopped it? _

She smiled at you, coyly, and said, “I think I’m going to keep it in my back pocket for some other time, Sawyer. You’ll find out eventually.”

_ Eventually _ ended up being your birthday.

She didn’t tell you that, though. She planned an evening for you. It started with dinner at a tapas place where you sat in a corner and fed each other bites of things.

(“I never understood why people liked doing this,” she breathed, as she watched her fork slide out from between your lips, “and then I met you, and I suddenly get it.”)

(You fed her a bit of bruschetta with your fingers, letting her tongue brush up against the pads, and wondered how many people in the room would see that and understand that, in lesbian terms, you’d basically just had a tiny bit of sex with her right here in this corner booth.)

You each ordered a glass of wine, and she declined a second glass for both of you before you could respond to the waiter’s ask.

You raised an eyebrow at her.

“I want you sober,” she said. “And don’t overeat.”

After dinner, she followed you outside and snaked her fingers between yours. 

“Decision time,” she said. “We can walk up to Roadside Radio over on 28th, and have after-dinner drinks and enjoy the blues band they’ve got lined up in an hour. Or…”

“Or?” You stepped closer to her, pinning your clasped hands between your hips.

“Or,” she leaned closer, her lips almost brushing your ear, “we can go home now, where I’ve stashed you an extra birthday present or two, and you can find out what I’m wearing under this dress to celebrate this… festive… occasion.”

When you pulled back to look at her, her eyes were nervous, sparkling, but dark with excitement.

It’s cute that she pretended there was even a decision to make.

The moment you walked back into her apartment, you pivoted and pressed her back against the door, hands already reaching for the hem of the little black dress she was wearing. But she caught your wrists and pushed you back, not forcefully but with the finesse of someone with all her training in martial arts and her understanding of the mechanics of the body.

“ _ Your _ birthday,” she murmured. “Let me make it about  _ you _ .”

Well. Okay then.

She crouched down, slipped your feet out of your heels, and for a moment you felt painfully small when she stood again and towered over you with hers still on. But then she met your eyes and you recognized something excited in them, but also something shy, and then she bit the corner of her lip in the way she often did when she was nervous about something emotional, something that made her vulnerable, something about  _ you _ .

“Alex,” you murmured, reaching gently for her face to soothe her, but that seemed to flip her back into stronger resolve. She inhaled sharply and smiled again, a little more darkly this time, and guided you back to the sofa, your toes sinking into the rug, and pushed you back onto it with a shove of the shoulders.

And then, what the hell? She turned and walked away—

To flip the switch that lit the fireplace and hit “play” on the stereo to start up some music you recognized but couldn’t place, something sort of loungey with a strong bass. Then she leaned on the mantel for a moment, as though gathering herself, and then her hips began to move slowly, and  _ oh god, this was actually happening. _

Stripping, as a performance, has always made you a little uncomfortable. You had then, and still now, only ever seen one actual strip show, when you were 22 and in the Academy in National City, dating a girl who had just turned 21. You’d been to gay bars before, one or two in Nebraska before you moved, but this was your first time in an actual  _ lesbian _ club, and your first time in a really big city. You had a drink together on the main floor and got in line to get into the basement where the dance floor was. It was packed, and they were one-in, one-out at the bottom of the stairs, so you waited a good forty-five minutes, but you didn’t care; your date was cute and you were thrilled to be out for a night, and it was fun to flirt and touch in public in a space where nobody cared. You finally made your way through the line, excited to dance with her and feel her body move against yours, only to discover the hard way that nobody was dancing: they were standing, and staring in one direction, and hollering at a very attractive, if a little girly for your taste, woman on a pole at the front of the room.

Your date loved it, standing behind you and wrapping her arms around you and watching with her chin resting on your shoulder. Her fingers would flex against your stomach or your arm whenever the dancer did something particularly athletic or removed another item of clothing.

But for you, you found that you didn’t know where to put your eyes. It felt too intimate, somehow, for strangers, for the dancer to be a stranger to you and for you to be surrounded by a sweaty pack of strangers. The dancer looked like she was having a good time and you were pretty sure she wasn’t faking that part, and the stage was covered in tips, and unlike the scenes you’d seen in movies, nobody was trying to get close enough to actually tuck bills into the waistband of her thong. 

You felt guilty about your discomfort. You told yourself it wasn’t judgmental; it wasn’t some deep-seated Catholic guilt or rural Nebraska prudery rearing its ugly head. You just… didn’t feel like you deserved to see her like that, even though the whole point was that she wanted you to look.

So you spent the next forty-five minutes watching her shoes, and the shoes of the dancers who came on afterward. They were always sparkly and they never came off and, like a cat watching a laser pointer, you could follow them with your eyes as they stepped and spun and occasionally flipped upward toward the ceiling if a girl pulled some especially acrobatic moves on the pole.

So you never really understood stripping. Until that night, with Alex.

Initially, as Alex moved back toward you with a little extra sway in her step, you felt that same discomfort and desire to look away. And you realized in that moment that the discomfort wasn’t about intimacy: it was about objectification, about turning this woman you felt so much for into something to  _ look at _ .

But Alex wanted you to look, so you looked. You watched the way her hips moved as she walked toward you. As the dress shifted, you could see the shape of her legs, of her body, under it. You watched the flex of her strong calves in those high heels until they stopped in front of you, and then watched her ass as she turned around in front of you, and by the time she said  _ unzip me _ , your mouth had gone completely dry.

And then you unzipped the back of her dress, and revealing underneath that same satin chemise she’d worn on Valentine’s day, and the sound that came out of your throat was quiet and short and primal.

She danced for you, over you, through the song and into the next, and once you finally gave yourself permission to watch and desire and fantasize about everything you wanted to do to this body,  _ her _ body, it became one of the most profoundly intimate, profoundly sensual things you’d ever experienced, even as your hands stayed squarely on the couch cushions beside your knees. She was making herself so vulnerable to you, and the power rush that gave you was intoxicating.

You found yourself making accidental noises, little grunts and gasps of arousal when she’d bend down away from you, or brush against your body with her thighs or her ass, or glance over her shoulder and catch your eyes. The negligée came off toward the end of the first song, her fingers gathering the hem bit by bit and drawing the whole thing slowly over her head, and underneath she wore lingerie that was made even sexier by how  _ Alex _ it was: black bikini briefs and a black underwire bra without padding, simple and relatively practical except for the part where they were made of silk and lace, and  _ God _ , you wanted to bend down and drag those panties off her  _ with your teeth _ and then spend the rest of the night making her beg for you, for every part of you, over and over. You wanted to tease her and you wanted to bite her. You wanted to lick her tenderly until she sobbed and you wanted to find out how much of yourself you could make her ache to take inside her. You wanted to fuck her with the care and attention of life-long lovers and the aggression and objectification of strangers in a back room, all at once.

And you must have accidentally said some of those words aloud because she turned and straddled you, her knees at your hips. She tipped her lips -- swollen, she must have been biting them while she danced -- to your ear, and said, “No. Tonight I’m doing that to  _ you _ .” 

You grabbed her hips, fingers digging into that silk and lace, and pulled pulled her down into your body. She ground into you hard, her arms over your shoulders, her forehead against yours, until all you could do was bend your head down and bite down on the muscle at the base of her neck -- and then, looking over her shoulder, you could see her feet, and she was  _ still wearing her stilettos _ , and that made you bite down even harder and she groaned, leaning into it. 

“I might,” she breathed, “This wasn’t part of the plan, but I might need you to take the edge off for me before I finish taking care of you.”

That was all the invitation you needed: you turned her around, her knees outside your thighs and her back flush against your chest, and slipped one hand into those lace-front panties and the other up under her underwire and set about the tender act of possessing, as wholly as you could, as wholly as she wanted, this body that she’d offered to you.

She came altogether too quickly. You almost considered it a personal failing on your part. 

But she collapsed back against you and took only a few moments to recover. Then she stood up, slipped out of the bra that had ridden up her chest and strappy sandals that had to be cramping her feet, and took you by the hand -- you, still fully clothed with your hair up, how could that  _ be _ ?--and took you to bed.

She undressed you slowly, and then,  _ then _ , your arms outstretched at your sides, she tied your wrists to the bedframe with more heavy, black satin and covered your eyes with a final piece. And then her mouth travelled everywhere: it sucked on your fingers, your throat, your breasts, your toes, until you were so turned on you were sure you were actually floating off the bed. She fucked you over and over again, with her tongue and her fingers, and when you’d come she’d relent for just awhile, kissing your thighs or your face while you recovered, and then she’d start again, so gentle and determined and beautifully demanding. 

After the third orgasm, you heard her shuffle, then the buzz of the vibrator, and that was the only thing you stopped.

“No,” you gasped, “just you, only you.”

So the vibrator went away, and her fingers slid between your legs again, and it shouldn’t have felt so good anymore but it did, it  _ did.  _ You were sure you’d never been so aroused, and you kept begging her for more -- more fingers, more pressure,  _ more _ , until she gasped your name with a tone of wonder in her voice.

“Maggie. Maggie, you’re so  _ open _ .”

You almost laughed at that, in the middle of everything, because she’d been here, in the room with you, for all of this, right? How could you  _ not _ be?

“More,” you whimpered-- _ whimpered _ \--again, pushing your hips into her hand, because yes, you were open, you felt nearly liquid, dissolved in care and attention and endorphins, and the only thing that could make you feel closer to whole, closer to solid again, was  _ more _ of her. 

“Maggie, there isn’t any more,” she murmured. With her free hand, she reached up and slipped off your blindfold, her fingers steady inside you, and you managed to lift your head far enough to see that there was nothing left but her thumb.

Oh god.  _ Oh god. _

You collapsed back against the pillows. Her fingers flexed inside you and your whole body convulsed.

You’d done… the rest… a few times before. Mostly with Emily, and only once on the receiving end, and you’d planned for it, worked slowly up to it all evening. And now, almost by accident, you found you  _ needed _ it from Alex

“Untie my wrists,” you breathed at her, “get the lube from the nightstand, and give me the rest.”

She looked at you in awe from where she knelt between your legs, her free hand rubbing gently at your stomach. “You -- you sure?”

“Yes, Alex,  _ please _ .”

A few minutes later, with your fingertips resting on her forearm, your body fully took her hand. A little help from her tongue and you came again, a wailing, animal sound somehow escaping as your orgasm dragged on, your body clutching at hers in every way it could. It finally ended, and she slipped out carefully, and it was something about that, this simultaneous feeling of care and tenderness and rawness and loss, that drew a sob from you.

“Babe,” she breathed, climbing up to lie beside you, “oh, sweetie.” She pulled your body into hers, wrapped you in herself. You weren’t crying but you couldn’t remember the last time you’d felt both so vulnerable and so safe.

You knew better than to trust the emotions that surfaced in the hormonal aftermath of really good sex, but in that moment...

Well. You knew how you felt. 

The next morning was a Sunday. You awoke to the scent of her making eggs and coffee. You showered together, because you still craved to have her near you, and kissed long and slow and deep under the water even though every erogenous zone on your body was far too tired and tender for her to touch. And then you rubbed arnica into the bruise on her shoulder from where you’d bitten her. You rubbed it into a few other bruises, too, scattered around her body from the week’s work.

You knew better than to say how you felt, so soon.

(You weren’t a fan of saying how you felt, ever. You still aren’t.)

But you knew, then.

You knew.

 

\--

 

When you get yourself off, your fantasies almost always take you to that night.

You don’t mean for them to, all this time later. You wish you could have some other memory that turns you on as much as that one, or that you could just lose yourself in your imagination.

The books, the erotica you bought, they help somewhat. But there comes a point when you’re too close to orgasm to be able to read anymore: your eyes become unfocused, your lids half-drop. And in that space, more often than not, you find yourself under Alex again. Sometimes sitting with her body dancing over you. Sometimes tied up and driven to the kind of desperation that only great trust and love can permit.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NSFW.

After awhile, you ease up on the rules you’ve imposed on food and drink and exercise.

But not sex.

Even if you wanted to, sex just doesn’t want to find you. Mostly because you don’t have the emotional strength for hookups anymore, but you also don’t have the emotional stamina for relationships.

You’re like a toddler with more grown-up desires and slightly better self-control, basically.

But only slightly.

Because like a toddler, you struggle with impulse control when the impulse and the craving are strong enough.

Like a toddler, you are capable of making very, very bad decisions.

It happens like this:

 

\--

 

You don’t see Alex at the bar for awhile. In some ways that’s nice: it gives you the space to talk to people, maintain your networks, without the distraction of wondering if she sees you, wondering who she’s with. But you find that you miss her in your peripheral vision. You miss the gentle, reassuring awareness of her. 

A month passes and you don’t see her, and you wonder where she is.

You’ve typed out a half-dozen texts over the month and deleted them without sending any. 

 

\--

 

You go to a lesbian bar one night, the same one you went to back when you were 22, where you saw the strip show.

When you walk down to the basement, you know what you’re signing up for, this time. 

You watch the dancers for awhile -- and not just their shoes. But at the end of the day even this doesn’t distract you. It feels less uncomfortable than it did when you were younger, but no more intimate, no more arousing.

You leave the biggest tip you can afford in one of tip cans on the bar, and you go home.

 

\--

 

You remember, sometimes, the last time you and Alex had sex.

You remember playing some Cyndi Lauper song, only because it was the first thing that caught your eye that wasn’t abysmally depressing. There was only so much sadness you could take, and at that moment, the sadness growing from inside you -- the sadness radiating outward from your gut, swelling your diaphragm -- that was all you could take.

So you played less-depressing music and took a swig of tequila to numb yourself and you reached for her, for Alex, for her hands in yours, to dance with you because you were not, were  _ not _ , going to have anger and frustration and devastation be the last thing the two of you felt together.

(The sadness, you knew, would be inescapable.)

It was cheesy as fuck, and you knew it, but what alternatives were there? You didn’t have the brainpower to crack jokes, and if you tried to talk, you weren’t sure what you’d say or where it would take you.

So you shared a drink and pulled her to dance with you.

That was really all it was supposed to be: a silly dance-off in your kitchen. 

You can understand, in retrospect, why Alex might have thought it was an invitation for more. Yours was never a relationship of lighthearted emotional intimacies. You did share those, of course: the high-fives over the accomplishment of menial tasks, the flopping on the couch side-by-side after long days, the bickering over the remote. But they were never an end in themselves, for the two of you.

You took a linguistics course in college where you studied signs and symbols, and how a word gets its meaning by pointing to a larger concept made up of all your experiences and associations brought up by that word.

That’s what your casual affections were, with Alex: small gestures that pointed to larger ones, larger feelings, deeper emotions, the stuff that not even words could touch.

You don’t know what the fuck you were thinking, expecting that a cheesy dance in your (her) living room could have ended with just that.

There was a brief moment, a flash, when she pulled you close and tipped her head to kiss you, and you thought to yourself -- deluded yourself into thinking -- that you could resist her. 

The resistance broke as soon as you put it up.

Because her breath and her skin still felt like  _ your  _ Alex, and her hands on you felt like  _ your _ Alex’s hands. So your lizard-brain, your hopeless id, thought that maybe if you could be like this together again, if she could remember that you were, that you always wanted to be,  _ her _ Maggie, that everything about your body and your soul and your longing was  _ hers _ , that she might change her mind and take back the words you’d made her say to you.

And so, weak, you tipped your head up again and met her lips.

She kissed you and kissed you and kissed you, soft lips and gentle tongue, and then you were reaching for each other’s shirts, and as you made your way back toward the bed, she breathed a laugh near your ear and said, “Are we really doing this?”

And your heart broke a little more, but you smiled at her, laughed a little, and hoped the look at your eye would answer for you.

You were trying, you supposed, to reverse the meaning of things. It used to be that small gestures of affection were stand-ins for everything enormous that she meant to you. Now, instead, you’d make this one, large gesture of affection stand in for… what? The loss of everything? The small affections that you’d try to take away and carry with you, you supposed.

She reached for the hem of your shirt, and reached forward for another kiss, and you couldn’t. You  _ couldn’t _ .

Something about break-up sex felt more realistic than break-up kissing. Kissing, you’d always felt, was so much more intimate than sex. So you ducked away from her mouth, pushed her hands from your body and reached for her belt. 

You got her naked below the waist and went down on her, kneeling by the bed, as though keeping her body half-covered could trick you into pretending this wasn’t her, or this didn’t matter, or this wasn’t the end. But then she pushed you off of her body and tugged you up onto the bed and tugged your pants off, too, and you found yourself with your head resting on her inner thigh and her head resting on yours as you lay on your sides and went down on each other.

This was never your favorite kind of sex, or even a kind that you generally liked much. Everything was upside-down, so your familiarity with her body, with the way she liked to be touched, kind of went out the window. Concentration kind of sucked, too: your own pleasure could be a distraction from your focus on hers.

But it was still profoundly intimate. Her hair tickled your skin and her arm wrapped around your thigh and her lips and nose brushed against you in places they didn’t usually reach. She was good at this: better than you were, probably, and after a long stretch of gentle touching and careful self-control, you gave in to your need to close your eyes and open your mouth and let yourself be an object for her.

When you came back to yourself, you rolled onto your back and settled her firmly onto your mouth, straddling you, and kept her there for as long as you, and she, could bear it. She leaned forward, her hands braced on your hips. You closed your eyes through the whole thing and oscillated between wanting to drown yourself in everything about her and wanting to imagine that she were someone, anyone, else.

And, of course, it didn’t change anything.

“It’s us,” you murmured to her, and as you heard yourself you realized you’d failed at your decision not to beg.

Moderately faceless sex didn’t negate her desire for an entirely faceless child.

You took a quick shower, and then you kept packing. 

 

\--

 

“Winn,” you say, one evening. You’re at the bar, sipping beers and sharing a basket of fries.

“Maggie,” he replies.

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

He freezes, a handful of fries halfway to his mouth. “I… yes? Should I be nervous?”

“No. I mean, I hope not? You don’t have to answer,” you say.  

He stuffs the fries in his mouth and then nods at you. “Okay,” he says, his mouth full, “shoot.”

“How come you don’t date?”

And to your mortification, Winn blushes beet red and then ducks his head. He finishes chewing and then he swallows. “I date. I’ve had dates. Girlfriends, even.”

“Yeah, I know, I--” you stutter, backpedaling. “It’s just, we’ve been friends what, over a year now, and I’ve never known you to date anyone. Or even to hook up or anything, as far as I know.”

“Well, no, I definitely don’t hook up,” he says. “That’s never been my…” he scratches nervously at his nose and then thumbs at a wrinkle in his forehead.

“You know what? Never mind,” you say, “I’m sorry I asked. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“No, no.” He sighs, dropping his hands to the table around his beer bottle. “I don’t really like… hooking up. I dunno, add it to the list of qualities that probably mean I should surrender my man-card. But like… I like relationships. The idea of sex with someone I don’t care about just doesn’t really appeal to me most of the time.”

“Weren’t you dating Lyra for awhile, back when I was with Alex?” 

He ducks his head. A corner of his beer label comes loose, and he peels it away, revealing the glue and white paper underneath. “Yeah, for awhile. She was…” he swallows, then goes to work on another corner of the label. “It was good for awhile but…” he looks up at you, pointedly, “I mean, you may remember that she got me arrested once.”

You chuckle. You do, indeed, remember that.

“She just… she could be so  _ mean _ , and manipulative. When things were good, they were great. But I sort of got scared of her, and… it was Alex, you know.”

“Alex?”   
  
“Who convinced me to end it. I mean, she didn’t  _ convince _ me, exactly. More just… supported me. She’d tell me how I didn’t deserve to be treated like that. And it took awhile for me to realize that she was right. I was a little scared to break it off, to be honest, because of her temper--Lyra’s, I mean, not Alex’s--and it was sort of weird to ask Kara for help because, like, I used to have a  _ thing _ for Kara, and if I’d asked James it would have been… I don’t know. He would have supported me but I would have felt weird about it. So Alex put her number in my phone on speed-dial and told me to call her if anything went sketchy when I broke it off. It never did, but… yeah. I was glad for Alex then.”

You smile at him. That sounds like something Alex would do.

“Anyway. Yeah. So I don’t do hookups much. It’s not like I’ve  _ never _ done them. But generally, I’d rather get to know someone first. Or at least have a plan to get to know someone first.” And then he takes a swig of his beer to end the line of questioning.

You don’t have a history of being very good at separating emotional and physical intimacy. It’s easy to want to fill voids in the former using the latter.

Winn’s stuffing a few more fries into his mouth. You reach over and take a few for yourself.

If you can’t have sex, you suppose, you might as well have carbs and salt.

 

\--

 

The alien bar has a very, very elaborate restroom.

M’gann explained it to you once: different aliens have different… waste-disposal needs, and not all of them work all that well with regular toilets. Add to that the fact that some aliens have to get in and out of elaborate bio-cloaking and, well. Shared alien spaces need some high-intensity sanitation.

The bar ordered the thing from some off-the-grid company in Japan that takes payment in bitcoin and specializes in provisions for aliens. The bathroom is a unit, a single-stall, and between uses the whole room goes through an automated 45-second sterilization process.

So the bathroom in the alien bar is the cleanest bathroom in National City, you’re sure of it, but it’s also the one with the longest line most of the time because some aliens take a  _ really  _ long time and then there’s a 45-second pause between each use.

You learned the hard way, early on, never to wait for urgency before you get in line at the bar.

It’s a Wednesday evening and you’re there by yourself; you played a game of pool with one of the regulars and sampled some new cocktail on the menu, and you go and get in line. You discover, with a groan, that there are a half-dozen people already waiting, and you contemplate taking off and waiting until you get home but you promised Brian a game of darts and damn if that sweet, gentle fuck-up doesn’t hold the strings to your heart sometimes.

So you wait, propped up against the wall in the hallway that runs from the edge of the bar back to the bathroom, clicking through a sudoku puzzle on your phone.

And then a few minutes later you hear footsteps, so you glance up.

And, of course, it’s  _ her _ .

And she looks… happy to see you?

“Hey,” she says, smiling, like it hasn’t been six weeks since you saw each other, and since that last time you saw each other wasn’t the most substantial one-on-one conversation you’ve had since you broke up. “Ugh, it’s gonna be a wait, eh?”

“Hey,” you say, clicking your phone to sleep. “Yeah.”

She props herself against the wall beside you. “How’ve you been?” she asks.

You blink.

Okay. You’re doing this?

You guess you’re doing this.

You slip your phone into your back pocket.

“You know,” you say. “Eat, sleep, work. Yoga. Bike maintenance.”

She hums.

“Haven’t seen you here in awhile,” you offer.

She smiles in that way she does, sort of tweaking her lips to the side, and nods, almost apologetically. “You know,” she says, “eat, sleep, work. Hang out with Kara. Bike maintenance.”

Your eyes flit down to her fingers. 

You’ve always found it unreasonably attractive when women have fingers just a little bit stained with engine grease. Not enough to make their hands dirty -- just enough to colour the lines of their knuckles, the beds of their nails. 

You’ve never been one for manicures. You tend to be attracted to women who work too hard with their hands for a manicure to make sense.

Alex’s hands are clean, though. You knew they would be. She keeps a giant tub of that gritty mechanic’s soap under her kitchen sink, because she’s still a doctor and doctors can’t have artfully greasy hands.

The line inches forward and you chat about cases. She looks… different, somehow, than she has before. Lighter. More comfortable. Less afraid of you. You crack a work joke and she retorts with something sarcastic about the NCPD, and that’s the first time since you broke up that she’s felt comfortable enough to be sarcastic with you. 

You think of how these small intimacies always stood for something larger, between you. 

You don’t know what’s up, or what’s changed. Part of you is elated for her. You’ve missed this version of her: the one that so few people are allowed to see. The one that you used to share with Kara and nobody else.

But part of you wants it to stop, because this friendliness can slide so easily into intimacy, and your heart isn’t good at respecting the boundaries your head sets.

Your heart could so easily be fooled by the idea that her sudden comfort and ease with you, after all this time, means that something has changed between you. Or that something  _ could _ change between you -- and both of these ideas are terrifying.

This strange détente, this understanding that she belongs at the edge of your experience -- not at its center, but not fully beyond your reach either -- has become… not quite comfortable, you suppose, but safe, somehow.

So, finally, after ten or fifteen minutes of gentle ribbing and laughter that feels far more familiar than you are with her, anymore, you ask her:

“Something good happen today, Danver?”

Her smile turns the slightest bit self-conscious. “I--what?”

You laugh a little and let your head tip back to rest against the chipped red paint of the wall. “You’re just… I don’t know, maybe this is weird, but you’re happier than I’ve seen you in awhile. Not that I’ve seen you recently, but. You know.”

Alex smiles with self-deprecation and glances down. “I guess I just… I feel good about things.”

“Things?”   
  
“My life. Where it is. Where I want it to go. I’ve had some things happen lately that have given me a little clarity, and it’s been…” She exhales sharply. Her eyes flit toward yours and then away and up, toward the ceiling. “It’s been awhile since I’ve felt that way.”

And you can’t help it: your heart fills for her, warms for her.

Even when you were angry at her, at everything she’d said and done to you, you’ve always, on a visceral level, wanted nothing more than her happiness.

A beep and a rushing sound as the sanitation cycle engages again. The line inches forward. 

You ask her about basketball. She smiles and ribs you over how National City drafted her UConn point guard selection, and you roll your eyes and tell her that they’ll pay for it if their starting center gets hurt and they don’t have a backup.

Nervously, but kindly, she tells you that she’s known about you and Vaya for awhile, but that she’s sorry, anyway, to hear that it didn’t work out.

You shrug, and thank her.

Is it horrible that you have, ultimately, recovered more fully from Vaya than you think you ever will from Alex?

“Maggie,” Alex says, stepping closer to you.

Your eyes flit back up to hers.

“Maggie,” she says again, with a little smile, her hand coming up to touch your elbow.

You swallow hard. “Yeah?”

...and she points behind you. “You’re up.”

Your body twitches, jumping awake, and you realize that, yes, you did just hear the hiss and click of the door unsealing at the end of the sanitation cycle.

Flustered, you smile tightly, then you turn around and step into the restroom.

What the fuck is  _ wrong _ with you, Sawyer?

You go to the sink and splash a little water on your face. Then you use the toilet and flush. Then you come back to the sink, wash your hands, and splash a little more water on your face.

You meet your own eyes in the mirror, holding still as the cold water drips off your nose and your chin, and remind yourself that you’re feeling this right now, this twisting in your gut, because for the first time since your breakup you’ve had a conversation with her that reminds you of how she can be when her guards are down, how sweet and funny and charming and accidentally goofy and pettily competitive, and that version of her has existed only in your memory, now, for so long that you’ve begun to wonder if it was ever real.

You tear off a paper towel with a little too much force and pat your face and hands dry, and then push it into the trash built into the wall.

You inhale deeply, sharply, from the diaphragm like you do in yoga -- and sputter a little against the lingering scent of the sanitizing vapor.

Heh. Figures.

When you open the door, Alex is standing there waiting, one foot propped against the wall behind her. In an unusual turn for this bar, there’s nobody else in line. She smiles at you, tight and wordless, as you step down and hold the door open to keep the sanitation cycle from engaging.

“Should I--” you gesture at the door with your other hand.

Both of you used to pee while the other stood two feet away brushing her teeth. You figure she probably wouldn’t need a full sterilization cycle just to use the toilet after you, but...

“No, thanks,” she says, reaching past you to grab the door.

Her pinky brushes your index finger, and the feeling vibrates up your arm, because something about you will always vibrate to her frequency. 

(Your boss is a crotchety old white guy who mostly pisses you off and is mostly pissed off by you but every now and then, he surprises you with kindness.

He was the only person at the precinct to notice when your engagement ring disappeared.

You were in the break room, re-upping your coffee, and he was opening a new carton of powdered creamer.

“We all have the one who got away,” he said, “but I know that doesn’t make it hurt any less. I’m sorry, Sawyer. She seemed all right, for a fed.”)

That’s what Alex is, you think. The one who got away. Which means you’ll always feel like this, you suppose, around her.

You smile at her as best you can and pull your hand away, and turn to walk toward the bar.

You make it one step. Two. Three.

“Maggie,” she says.

You stop and turn around.

She hasn’t moved. Her grip on the door tightens, knuckles flexing. She glances down, then up again, and licks her lips.

It’s almost microscopic, but you see it: she pushes the door a little further open toward you.

And, oh god. You shouldn’t.

But you’re weak, so weak, and your body is vibrating and full from twenty minutes of laughing with her.

You take the three steps back to her, set your hand on the edge of the door beneath hers, and then you follow her back into the bathroom.

If there was any doubt, any question about what might be about to happen, it disappears when she grabs you by the lapels as soon as the door clicks closed, tugging your body into hers and stumbling a half-step back so that she’s pinned herself between you and the counter. For a moment you freeze like that, together, and you’re staring at her lips to avoid seeing what’s in her eyes. 

Those lips tip down toward yours.

Her hands grip your jacket tightly.

And some tiny, still-sentient corner of your brain realizes that you might be about to fuck her but that kissing her will break you heart when she walks away again.

You drop your chin and dive forward, pressing your open mouth to the side of her neck, and when she gasps you feel the vibrations against your lips, echoing into your throat. Your hands slide from her hips up to her waist, dragging the hem of her shirt up with them, and her body is as firm and warm as it’s ever been. You kiss her neck hard and wet, from the collar of her shirt up to her ear where you grab the lobe between your teeth and  _ tug _ , just hard enough.

Her abdomen flexes under your hands when she groans.

The fingers of one of her hands slide into your hair at your nape, fisting there and pulling you closer. Her other hand fumbles to pull your shirt from your jeans, but something in your body recoils from it, from her touch. You want her under your hands but you don’t want to be under hers; you’ve spent too much time feeling pinned under her, even when she was nowhere near you. So you push her touch away away and immediately drop your hands to her belt, to pull at the leather and the tongue. Her hands join yours, brushing against them, helping them. The belt and the fly come open and you have to crouch a little to push everything down below her hips, halfway down her thighs.

You make the mistake of looking up at her face.

Her lips are swollen. She must have been biting them. Her eyes are somehow hard and warm and they make you want to love her.

_ Fuck _ .

You could turn her around, bend her over the counter to keep those eyes off you, but they’d just find yours again, reflected in the mirror, and god, you want her, every fiber of you wants her, has probably always wanted her -- not like this, not just like this, but  _ all of her _ . 

You’re still in love with Alex Danvers, and this tryst feels like a hit for an addict who’s made it through withdrawal and now remembers how good the high used to feel.

You know you’ll have to walk out of here and walk away when this is done, and if you look her in the eyes when you make her come then you won’t be able to do that. 

So you nudge her up toward the counter and she hoists herself until she’s sitting, and you dive forward, sinking your fingers into her, and she groans again and collapses back against the mirror, one hand curled around your flexing wrist.

“Maggie,” she whimpers, “Oh, Maggie,”

You could kiss her to shut her up, but kissing, like eye contact, is a bad idea. This is as close as you’ve ever come to stranger sex. This is the moment of overwhelmed passion that romance writers make sexy but that you know, already, is going to leave you feeling sad and lonely and full of regret, but now, when she’s wet and your fingers are seated deep in her, you could no more stop this than stop breathing.

You bend a little, nuzzle her breast, feel where her nipple is hard and bite it through her shirt and bra. She clenches around you. Her fingers in your hair pull your head tighter against her body.

You feel around inside her, twisting, gentle, until she relaxes, opens, and then you slide out again and find that place you remember, right at the front of her opening, that -- yes, her thighs fall further open and her head hits the mirror and she swallows a soft keening sound, and you feel a surge of relief and affection and a kind of hot, predatory pride that you still remember how to take her tenderly, perfectly, apart.

Because this isn’t stranger sex. This is sex with the person you’ve loved more than you’ve loved anyone. This is sex with someone whose body you still remember to the freckle when your eyes are closed.

Your mouth latches onto her neck again and you fuck her deep and slow, dragging your fingers right  _ there _ with each stroke, because she isn’t a stranger and even like this, with your hands on her for the first time in years, in a bathroom of a nameless bar at the back of a graffiti-covered alley, you don’t know how to untangle sex from your love for her. You don’t know how to separate fucking from feeling. You tuck your thumb into your palm, wet it there, press it firmly to the base of her clit. Her breath catches.

You don’t stop until she goes taut against you, her fingers digging into your back, knees twitching at your hips.

Then she goes lax, and you go soft against her, your forehead dropping to her shoulder.

A moment of stillness.

Her hand begins to move gently up and down your back. You slip out of her and rest your slick fingers against her inner thigh.

You should wash your hand and walk away, but she’s stroking your back and breathing slowly, warmly, near your ear, and you can’t. You’re not ready yet.

You turn your head. Kiss her neck once, chastely. Then the hollow of her throat. Her sternum, just below her collar.

“Maggie,” she says.

Her nipple, less chastely, through the damp spot you made on her shirt.

Solar plexus.

“Maggie.”

Bellybutton.

You glance up when your lips reach hair, and find her eyes with yours to see if she’ll stop you. If she wants you to stop.

Her eyes are wide and dilated and fixed on you with hunger.

She weaves her fingers through your hair again and cradles your head as you look back down and drop lower, until you’re kneeling in front of her. You kiss her inner thighs, open-mouthed, cleaning up the taste of sex, and you refuse to look up again, refuse to see how she’s holding her eyes (lidded? Closed? Watching you?) or her head (thrown back, against the mirror? Cocked to the side and down, to see you better?).

With your hands resting on her knees, you make out with one thigh, all the way up to its crease, and then the other. She’s swollen and slightly parted from her orgasm and your fingers; you can see her inner lips and you want to run your tongue through them, all the way from the back of her opening up to the hood of her clit, but you wait, breathing there, nipping a little at the proud tendon as her thighs, constrained by her pants around her calves, try to open further for you.

You wait until her hand tightens in your hair and urges you to where you want to be. 

You lick and suck at her clit for awhile, but she’s wet and getting wetter against your chin so you slide down and crick your neck to close your mouth over her and push your tongue deep, over and over. She tenses against you, grinding just a little into your mouth, and you wish she would close her thighs around your ears because all you can hear is the sound of her irregular breathing and occasional, quiet pants of your name.

Back to her clit. You close your mouth around it, flick it as fast as you can with your tongue, right at the edge of the hood, where she likes it. You pull your hand around and under your chin, splay four fingers across her ass and run your thumb around the sensitive edge of her opening until, with a tight, barely-contained cry, she comes.

Just as she begins to relax, her muscles loosening, sit back just far enough to watch yourself drive your thumb deep inside her. She clenches, gasps a little in surprise, and, to your perfect satisfaction, comes again, just a little. You watch in quiet pleasure as her body pulls and flutters around yours.

Only when she’s still and soft again do you stand up. She hisses a little as you slide out of her, and you keep your eyes downcast, away from hers, as you take your thumb, slick with her, into your mouth.

In your peripheral vision, you see her slumped and spent against the mirror.

The room still smells like sanitizer.

“Just hang on,” she says, raising a hand toward you. “Just let me get my bearings back and--”

“Nah, that’s okay, Danvers,” you say. You wipe your thumb against your jeans. “I’m good.” 

You reach for the door.

“Maggie,” she says.

You turn the knob.

“Maggie,” she repeats, louder. The shuffle of her sliding to her feet, a metallic thunk as her boots hit the stainless steel floor, the jingle and hush as she pulls up her jeans and her belt.

You open the door just wide enough to slip out and tug it closed behind you.

“Maggie,” you hear, muffled, “come on! Maggie!”

You pull out your wallet while you walk toward the door. You only bought a $4 beer, but you drop a twenty--the smallest bill you have--on the bar, and don’t wait for change.  

Brian dashes over to you, darts in hand, but you beg off with an ambiguous excuse and don’t break stride long enough to hear his answer.

Just before you pull your bike helmet on, you hear her booted footsteps coming up the stairs toward the bar entrance.

You’re gone, peeled out of the alley, before she can catch you.

 

\--

 

Sawyer.

What the fuck, Sawyer.

_ What the fuck _ , Sawyer.

God.

She has a  _ girlfriend _ , doesn’t she?

She’s your ex, she broke your heart, she’s with someone else, and you just screwed her in a bar bathroom.

...You’re still in love with her, and  _ you just screwed her in a bar bathroom _ .

It’s all you can do to obey the traffic laws.

Your gut knots, your heart races. Your thumb is cold because it’s damp and hitting the wind.  _ She _ is dry on your index and middle fingers.

There is a flash, somewhere in the block between 83rd and Meyer Ave, when you are sure that you have never hated yourself quite so much as you do right now, right this second.

 

\--

 

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (8:48 pm) _

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (8:49 pm) _

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (8:53 pm) _

 

_ \-- _

 

**Alex** (8:53 pm): please pick up maggie

 

\--

 

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (8:54 pm) _

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (9:00 pm) _

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (9:05 pm) _

 

\--

 

**Alex** (9:05 pm): ok, I’m going to assume that you’re riding and that’s why you’re not answering. 

**Alex** (9:05 pm): because I know you wouldn’t just ignore me after what happened. so call me when you get home, ok?

 

\--

 

**You** (9:08 pm): Hey Winn, I need to ask you a question

**You** (9:08 pm): I hate to ask you this, I swore I never would, but it’s important

**Winn** (9:08 pm): Sure, buddy, what’s up?

**You** (9:09 pm): Did Alex and Ora break up?

**Winn** (9:09 pm): Oh, yeah, like, six weeks ago now? Didn’t you know that?

**Winn** (9:09 pm): I thought you were going to ask me something super top secret or something

**You** (9:10 pm): No, I didn’t know that

**You** (9:10 pm): Thanks, Winn.

**Winn** (9:10 pm): np

**Winn** (9:11 pm): Why do you ask?

 

\--

 

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (9:45 pm) _

_ Missed call from  _ **_Alex Danvers_ ** _ (9:50 pm) _

 

\--

 

Voicemail from  **Alex Danvers** (9:52 pm): 

_ Maggie, I can’t believe… [exhale]... is this really how we’re going to do this? I know you’re home, it’s a work night, you’re about to go to bed, just... Can you call me back? Please? Can we just talk about this? I know you’re going to listen to this message, if only to get rid of the red dot on your home screen, so… [sniff] Please, just call me. This doesn’t have to mean [time limit exceeded] _

 

\--

 

**Alex** (9:04 am): Winn says he texted with you last night so I guess you’re not dead

**Alex** (9:05 am): I want to talk about this. So I guess when you’re ready to be an adult and talk about it too, you know how to reach me.

 

\--

 

Like a toddler, you have struggled with impulse control, and the impulse won.

Like a toddler, you have made a very, very bad decision.

 

\--

 

You feel like a horrific, miserable, vile waste of a human skin.

Alex is right, of course. You should talk to her like an adult. And when she calls you, over and over and over again, your thumb hovers over the key to answer, but something paralyzes you and you can’t bring yourself to do it.

What would the point be? 

What can she possibly say to you?

_ It’s okay, Maggie, this doesn’t need to change anything. We can go back to what we were. _ The imagination of those words alone is enough to make your heart clench, devastated.

_ Maggie, I want you back. Are you  _ sure  _ you still don’t want kids? _ That’s still a non-starter.

_ Maggie what does this mean? What should we do now? _ But you’re done,  _ done _ , teaching her how to be a gay adult in the world.

Something about the sudden, jarring, devastating end to your relationship with Alex has always made its memory feel like an unburied coffin, lying cold but unhidden.

Maybe now, you’re finally shoveling.

 

\--

 

Over the next month or two, things happen.

You stop going to the bar.

You put in an application for promotion to Detective III.

You are promoted to Detective III and immediately set your sights on the Sergeant’s exam a year away.

You close three cases, including a cold case that you break open on a late night spent picking through the evidence with leftover pizza in one hand long after everyone but the desk officer has gone home.

You see Winn, from time to time. He squints at you a little the first time after.... After.

“What?” you ask.

“Huh?”

“You’re looking at me weird.”

“I--what? No, no I’m not--” he palms the back of his neck nervously.

You fold your arms and tip your head at him. “Winn.”

“It’s just… you asked about Alex and Ora. And then Alex was like…  _ extra _ short-tempered at work for three days, and, I won’t lie to you, it was kind of stressful, so… yeah. I’m… wondering.”

“Oh, Winn.” You ruffle his head a little, like a puppy. “There’s nothing to wonder.”

...Is that gaslighting? You hope you didn’t just gaslight him.

You just really, really don’t want him to know. Because this time, if there’s a side to be picked, he’d probably pick Alex’s, because that would be the right side to pick. 

But that would mean you’d lose him. And honestly, at this point, losing his steady, nerdy, goofy, friendly presence in your life might be as devastating as it was when you closed the door behind you and walked out of Alex Danvers’ life.

(Both times.)

 

\--

 

Three months pass before you get the phone call from Winn.

You’re still at the precinct, catching up on overdue paperwork after hours. You answer because it’s Winn and you always take his calls, but also because Winn hates talking on the phone when he’s not at work, and you know his shift ended at least an hour ago, so it must be important.

“Maggie,” he says, his voice pressed with barely-contained desperation, “Thank god, you answered.”

“Of course I answered. What’s up?”

“I’m sorry,” he rushes, “this is probably really inappropriate, and I wouldn’t call if I had any better options--”

“Whoa. Winn. Slow down. What’s going on?”

“It’s Alex,” he says, like it should be obvious. “She’s going to hate me,  _ hate _ me, for calling you, but she’s done something stupid and she’s going to get herself killed--”

You’re already standing, reaching for your vest and your sidearm and digging out that old bluetooth earpiece that fits under your helmet.

“Heading to my bike now,” you say, “tell me where to go and brief me on the way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on twitter @RoadieN60 where I like to post twitter-fics and headcanons and writing-related rant-threads.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter kicked my ass to write. I rewrote some of these scenes at least a half-dozen times each. Huge shout-out to [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter) for giving me a beta on this one because without an extra set of eyes, I'm really not sure it would have been coherent.
> 
> I'll try to catch up on my comment responses within the next day or two!

Parts of the night are predictable: 

You could have guessed that Alex’s stupid decision would involve Jeremiah.

You could have guessed that it would involve an under-planned, ill-advised, and off-the-books raid on a CADMUS facility.

You could have guessed that you’d end the night staring at Alex in the DEO medbay.

But parts of the night -- the worst parts -- you could never have predicted at all.

 

\--

 

Winn refuses to tell you anything but an address: 283 W. Plains Ave. When you get there, you find the building numbers jump from 281 to 285, but there’s an alley between them: you drive your bike past it and then slowly back in, your grip in place to throw the throttle into forward gear again at the slightest sign of anything out of place.

What you find there is Guardian, waiting expectantly for you, concealed behind a rusted dumpster. He motions for you to disconnect your call and power off your phone -- you do -- and he hands you one of Winn’s ultra-encrypted earpieces.

“Sorry for the cat-and-mouse,” James says, his voice rough through his vocoder, “but this is the only thing we’re sure CADMUS scanners aren’t picking up.”

You nod and lift your helmet far enough to remove your bluetooth earpiece and slip the new one into place while he starts his bike. “What do you know?” you ask him, but he gestures with his head that you should head out toward the road and take a right.

“I haven’t been briefed yet,” James replies, sounding like himself now, through the comms. “All Winn said is we have to get on 216 eastbound and he’ll give us more when he leaves the DEO.”

“I’m almost done downloading these blueprints,” Winn chimes in, whispering, like he’s hiding. “East on 216 and I’ll explain from the van.”

You follow James through the streets. It’s late enough that the roads are pretty clear, and cars tend to pull out of the way when they see the Guardian cruise up in their rearview. In just a few minutes you’re on the freeway, cruising through the suburbs toward the mountains and deserts beyond.

Absently, it occurs to you that you haven’t had a riding buddy since Alex.

You wonder if maybe James would like to make this a thing, later.

“Okay!” Winn announces, louder now, and you can hear the sound of his van starting up. “You’re going to take exit 24 and take a right, and then follow that for four miles. You’re going to a warehouse. It’ll look abandoned. It’s not.”

“Winn,” James says, “the hell’s going on right now?”

You’re glad he asked so that you don’t have to.

“The DEO raided a CADMUS facility today, arrested a bunch of lackeys and brought in two aliens for medical treatment. It was a good raid. But we didn’t expect Jeremiah Danvers to be there, so we didn’t plan to contain him.”

“Jesus, Alex,” you mutter under your breath.

“Yeah,” Winn agrees, making no effort to subdue his exasperation. “She managed to tag him with a microscopic geotracker. Embeds in the skin, feels like a zit if you touch it, he won’t even know it’s there. But Supergirl got hit with some kryptonite during the raid, plus she’d basically zapped her powers anyway, so J’onn said we’d wait and plan an extraction when she’d recovered. But Alex is Alex. She thought they’d find the tracker within hours, or a day at most, and then we’d lose him again. So she went off on her own. The only reason I know is because I saw her looking up his tracker data at my workstation. I have her tracker pulled up, too. She’s about four miles ahead of you.”

You glance over and meet James’s eyes. He nods, and both of you pick up your speed. 

“So what’s the plan?” you ask.

“You know her best,” James replies.

You laugh a little. “It’s been years, Guardian.”

But his silence speaks volumes. 

“Well, okay,” you say. “I guess we can try to stop her, or we can try to help her.”

“Yup,” James agrees.

“If we try to stop her, we’re fighting her and fighting CADMUS. If we try to help her, then she’s on our side, but we’re in deeper.”

“They’re not great odds no matter what,” Winn says.

 

\--

 

Alex only ever cried in your arms once, and it was over her father.

You held her while she sobbed, and then sat quietly with her in the aftermath when her embarrassment drove her to look anywhere, everywhere, except at you, even while she held your hands between hers, keeping you from moving away.

And when, finally, forty minutes after you’d arrived in her apartment, she spoke, her words shocked you:

“I failed him.”

“Sweetie,” you said, leaning toward her and pushing her hair back and out of her eyes, “no.”

But she nodded insistently. “They took him because of me,” she said, “and it’s been so long, and I’ve forgotten so much of him, that I couldn’t even tell he’d been brainwashed. He’s in there, Maggie, I can tell, and if I’d just  _ seen _ how deeply he’d been buried, I could have had him handled safely. I could have had him kept where he couldn’t hurt anyone for as long as it took to deprogram him.”

Of course Alex, weight-of-the-world Alex, was blaming herself.

 

\--

 

“Do you have the means to contain him in that van?” you ask.

“Yeah, I’ve got some tech here that should do it,” Winn says. “EMP pulse for his arm, kryptonite cuffs, tranq.”

You take a deep breath. “Okay,” you say, “let’s get them both home.” 

James nods firmly, once, in your peripheral vision. “You’re on.”

You see the warehouse and drive past it, ducking into an old abandoned service road. There’s a gulley there where you stash your bikes, hidden roughly under some dead brush, and then you backtrack together through the dark stretch of empty land under the cover of darkness. 

The sand muffles your footfalls. 

You can literally hear crickets.

“Her tracker’s on the east side of the building, not moving,” Winn says in your ear, making you jump a little. “She’s probably doing recon. You can catch her there.” 

Guardian presses something on the side of his visor, then nods and points to a broken-down half-wall on the far edge of the property. Low and slow, you follow him toward it. 

You see her look of indignation when she spots him.

It morphs into something different when she looks past him and sees you.

“You’re going to get us all killed,” she whispers, but James holds a finger to his lips and offers her an earpiece. 

“Alex,” Winn says cheerfully, “I don’t know how the hell you thought you were going to do this without blueprints, because I know J’onn locked you out of that part of the database for  _ precisely that reason _ . It’s up to you to figure out how to get past the guard, but I can get you down to the first sub-basement where you’re probably going to find him. But give me a sec to hack their security cameras and put them on loop feeds.” 

Alex licks her lips. Her eyes flit from Guardian’s over toward you. She squints at you and then sets her jaw, turning to look through the crack in the wall where she’s been eyeing a decrepit-looking utility door.

“This was a hasty relocation for them,” she says quietly. “They weren’t expecting the raid today. Their security is irregular and understaffed, which is  _ exactly why this is the day to do this _ .”

“Come on, Danvers,” you retort, “How the hell did you plan to get him home? Were you just going to show up and ask him to get on the back of your bike, please, for the drive back to the DEO?”

“They DEO would have sent me a chopper once I had him.”

“And what, he’s going to follow you out the door? Do you even know whose side he’s on right now? Because last time--”

“Last time is not this time.”

“Guys,” James says, exasperated, “Maybe instead of arguing about a lack of strategy, we should come up with one.” 

He taps something on the arm of his suit and unveils a small touchscreen showing building blueprints, and the three of you huddle over it together, debating entry points and access paths, when Winn’s voice comes through your earpieces again.

“Uh, guys? I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“We’re listening,” says James.

“Good news is, I’ve identified Jeremiah’s exact location based on the security footage.” The image of the blueprint begins to shift on Guardian’s screen, a red dot flashing in a small room on the second floor.

Alex’s breath picks up. “Okay,” she says, “and the bad news?”

“His door is locked from the outside.”

You let out the breath you’ve been holding. Beside you, Alex’s fist clenches, because she’s thinking the same thing you are: that her father is, in fact, a prisoner.

“I’m guessing it’s not something my suit can decode,” Guardian says. You know that over the years, Winn has upgraded his suit with the capacity to hack fingerprint scans and standard key locks. “What is it, retinal?”

“Two-factor,” Winn says. “Combination fingerprint with a randomly-generated access code that can only be received by a few authorized, encrypted devices.”

For a moment, the three of you sit together, thinking.

“We’ll just blast it,” Alex finally says.

You shake your head. “No way, Danvers. We’d bring every guard in the building down on our heads.”

“I’m here. I’ll risk it.”

“It’s  _ suicide _ ,” James insists.

Winn pipes up again, nervously this time. “I mean… guys… if I got in there with my tablet, I could hack it.”

“Winn, no,” you say, “this is not the time for you to be field-training.”

“I mean I agree, it’s not ideal, but it might be what has to happen,” he replies.

You look at Alex. To your relief, she looks conflicted, her zealotry over her father not so overpowering that it prevents her from seeing how risky that would be. 

“Winn,” Guardian says, “What do you think? It’s your skin.”

A beat.

“I think….” Winn sighs. “I think the idea scares me shitless, like really, wish I were wearing brown pants right now, but a badass we all love once told me nobody gets better by running away, and like, granted, that was a long  _ time _ ago, but like… yeah. I’ll do it.”

“Winn,” Alex says, more gently than you’re used to hearing her speak to him. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know, but I want to,” he says. “Jeremiah’s your family. You’re my family. Ergo, Jeremiah’s my family. And I literally couldn’t pick three people I’d trust more to keep me safe. Except, well, maybe Supergirl, but, ya know, with her being under the lamps and all.”

So. That’s settled.

A few minutes later, you meet up with him in a gulley with a good eye-line to the ventilation grill you plan to unscrew for access. He is, to your great relief, wearing a flak jacket.

At first, everything goes easily.

Too easily. 

You make it in, subdue the few guards you encounter without much trouble. Alex has brought a handful of DEO scramblers that create invisibility zones for you in high-traffic areas. And she was right: they clearly haven’t established their patterns fully in this space. People don’t know where things are. They haven’t internalized their routines yet. 

You follow the blueprint on Guardian’s arm, taking turns on point and cover, and Winn, unfamiliar with this kind of operation, listens carefully and moves quickly and quietly as he’s told, until you find yourselves in a hallway lined with doors, each with its own digital two-factor lock.

“Don’t touch them,” Winn whispers. 

Jeremiah’s room is the third door up on your left. Guardian stands guard at the door where you entered the hall. You go and stand guard at the door at the opposite end. Alex stands with Winn, who cracks his knuckles and sets to work.

And for a while, everything is silent except for the muted tap of Winn’s fingertips on his touchscreen. 

You can hear water dripping, somewhere, from a leaky pipe or faucet. 

Somewhere below you, booted footsteps. A rumble as a ventilation fan kicks in somewhere else.

You stand, and wait, and listen to the silence, and breathe.

And breathe.

Nobody’s coming for you.

You breathe.

This might work.

You breathe.

And later, you’ll curse yourself for letting this quiet, almost meditative moment, settle into you.

Because a muffled curse breaks the silence. Winn. You pivot to look at him--

Your boot catches on a crack in the old warehouse floor--

You stumble and throw out a hand to catch yourself--

Your hand lands on one of the high-tech locks.

An alarm sounds.

And nothing is silent anymore. Shouts, footfalls, noises from all around you.

“I’ve almost got it!” Winn cries.

“There’s no time!” Guardian yells back. 

“We’re  _ here _ ,” Winn insists, and you wonder when in the hell he developed this reserve of bravery and bravado.

“We’re done, Winn, let’s go,” Alex growls, sparing a fraction of a second to shoot daggers at you with her eyes. “Mission aborted. Get out.”

But you know, from the sound of Guardian’s blaster being fired, that you’re too late. And then, on your end of the hallway, a door opens and you’re met with the business end of an assault rifle.

Well, you think.

This is it. 

This is how you’re going to die: on a fool’s mission on the whim of Alex Danvers, alongside James and Winn.

You’re struck, fleetingly, by the fact that given the choice, these are the people you’d choose to die with. You just wish it were for a better cause.

“Formation!” Alex yells, stepping into her role as trap leader, easy as breathing. “Winn! Get down!”

(“Al--Alex? Alex?!” a muffled voice through the door. “Alex? Is that you?”)

You have a moderate tactical advantage and three more clips in your pockets. Guards funnel in the door and you take them out, one by one, as they come at you. Behind you, you hear Guardian’s blasters, and then Alex’s shoulder brushes yours and you’re firing side by side into the rows of guards streaming toward you.

You cry out as one of the bullets skims your right shoulder, taking a chunk of flesh with it. When you fire your gun your muscle screams against the strain of holding against the kick, and your aim is off. Alex, fires one perfect shot after the next, over and over, but the guards keep coming. You’re being driven back, and at this point, even if you unlock Jeremiah, you have no idea what the hell you’re going to do. 

The hammer clicks; your clip is empty. You drop it out and slam another into its place, adrenaline flooding you, and you can’t feel the pain in your shoulder anymore.

If anyone dies here, it will be you, first. None of these three people you love will die if there’s a way for you to die for them.

You hope Winn knows that he’s the most family you’ve ever really had.

You hope James knows that you wish you’d gotten to know him better.

And, as you start firing again, you hope to God that Alex knows how much you have always, always loved her.

But then, the dynamic of the attack shifts. You see men flinching, their rifles twitching, and then a cluster of them fall back out the door they came in. And as they fall out, you hear beyond them, from somewhere below you, the sound of fighting.

Behind you, Guardian yells as he braces himself against the full thrust of his blasters, while you and Alex manage to take out the remaining guards.

“Seconds!” Winn says, “Literally seconds away here!”

Wordlessly, Guardian runs back to his post and you run back to yours while Alex hovers nervously over Winn’s shoulder and below you, the sound of fighting persists.

(Who the hell are they fighting?)

You don’t know, precisely, what happens in those seconds while your back is turned.

There’s a gunshot, and then the thump of a body hitting the ground.

You wheel around and fire a shot into a CADMUS lackey who was not, apparently, fully incapacitated, and whose gun is clicking on empty.

Alex and Winn are lying on the ground, blood pooling beneath them.

 

\--

 

The fighting you heard? Turns out it was the DEO. Vasquez picked up the trace of Winn’s downloads, so J’onn, his hand forced, scrambled a last-minute team.

Your raid, for better or for worse, was successful. Winn managed to hack the lock, and now Jeremiah is in containment in a DEO cell. 

But you’re sitting in the medbay, listening to the beeping of machines with your eyes closed, taking comfort with each tone, with the occasional whirring of the automated blood-pressure cuff.

The door opens and heavy-booted footsteps approach. The sound of a chair being dragged, and a weight settling into it.

You don’t need to open your eyes to know it’s James.

“Debrief went okay?” you ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s not much they can do to me, though. They weren’t going to lock me up in one of their Gitmo boxes over this.”

You huff out a dry laugh at his dark humor.

“But Alex,” you say quietly. Your eyes open, and you look up at him.

“Alex,” James echoes. “I think if Alex had died, J’onn would have found a way to revive her just so he could kill her himself for going behind his back like that.”

As if on cue, the medbay door opens again and a new set of boots walk in, coming to a halt just beyond James.

“Any change?” Alex asks.

You look over to her. “No.”

Then your eyes go back to the hospital bed where Winn, hooked up to every wire and tube you can imagine, is sleeping.

 

\--

 

Alex told you, on the ride back to the DEO, what happened.

She’d been looking over Winn’s shoulder as he finished the decryption.

She let her guard down.

But Winn, from his angle, saw a reflection in the glass of his screen: a man, a lackey they’d taken down, raising a gun and aiming it at Alex.

He’d acted quickly and tackled her to the ground.

And that bullet, meant for Alex, had lodged itself in his back, below the edge of his vest.

 

\--

 

You turn your eyes away from Alex and settle them back on Winn. Alex stands frozen for a few more seconds, and then moves abruptly, as though shoved by a ghost, to the other side of the bed, where she grabs a chair and drags it closer to Winn’s bed.

The grating sound of the chair’s metal legs against the tile feels like it’s grinding right up your spine, but you tamp down the urge to glare at her.

For a few minutes, you all sit quietly: you, Alex, and James, listening to the sound of Winn’s monitors and machines, but a few minutes is all you get before Alex abruptly stands up again, rattling her chair against the floor, and starts pacing.

It feels like each footfall is striking inside your skull. 

“Sit down, Danvers.”

She freezes and turns to face you, eyebrows raised. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” you say. “This,” you gesture at her, at her movement, at the empty chair, “is stressing me out.”

She gapes at you, and then laughs incredulously, throwing her hands up by her shoulders. “Forgive me,” she spits sarcastically, “I’d hate to  _ stress you out _ or otherwise inconvenience you when Winn--”

“It’s not good for Winn either.” You inhale deeply and exhale slow: your anger won’t help anyone. “You know that. He’s sedated, not comato--”

“Okay,” James interrupts, and you look over at him. He looks tired and drawn. “I’m gonna… I’m going to maybe run home and change out of this,” he gestures down at his suit, “and into something more comfortable. Then I’m coming back, and I’m going to sit here with Winn, and by that time you guys are going to have worked out your shit, or taken it elsewhere, or figured out how to handle it.”

You lift a hand toward him as he stands up. “No, James, it’s--”

“Work it out,” he repeats.

Then he’s gone.

Alex stands still now, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. You can hear her fingers scratching at the fabric of her shirt. You clench your hands together and pin them between your knees, the pressure keeping you grounded.

Even like this, with your hand pulled tight into a fist, you imagine that you can feel the outline of the keypad that you touched. The one that set off the alarms that set off… everything else. 

 

\--

 

Your tía would light a  _ vela _ every day when she came home from work. 

Within two days of moving in with her, you learned that it was part of her routine: that she’d come in from work and go to the little wall-mounted shelf near the TV and she’d light a candle there. She’d pause, a hand resting on the shelf, and close her eyes for a moment in prayer. Then she’d open her eyes, take a deep breath, and greet you with a smile. She’d ask you what you wanted for dinner or, when you were older and started cooking sometimes, what you were making. She’d put her arm around you and kiss you on the temple or on the top of your head.

For the first few months that you lived with her, you tried to make yourself small. You wiped down the sink every time you brushed your teeth. You ate whatever she offered, even if it was full of mushrooms, which you didn’t like at the time. 

When you’d been with her for two months, she caught you looking at the classified ads in the  _ Blue Springs Gazette _ , tracking down work you could legally do at fourteen: snow shoveling, lawn-mowing. Maybe, ugh,  _ babysitting _ , though you hated that idea. Your Papá hadn’t packed your bike, but if you could get one, maybe you could do newspaper delivery. 

Tía was spending so much money on you, on groceries and school supplies, and eventually you were going to need clothes.

“Maggie,” she said quietly. She’d knocked on your bedroom door and then come in, two fresh-baked ginger cookies on a plate, and you hadn’t had time to hide the paper. She put her hand on your back and stood over you, at your desk; she saw the notepad where you’d started writing down phone numbers of places you wanted to call. “Maggie, what are you doing?”

You told her.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “you’re fourteen. If you want to pick up some odd jobs for extra spending money, that’s fine, but you don’t need to worry about paying the bills.”

You must have looked at her skeptically, because she laughed a little, not unkindly, and squeezed your shoulder.

“I mean it,” she said, “I make good money, and it’s kind of nice to have someone other than myself to spend it on. If you want, we can revisit this when you’re sixteen, but not before.”

That night, lying in bed, was the first time you cried over what your parents had done to you.

You would be staying with your aunt until you were sixteen. Eighteen. Graduated.

You were never going home, but you were also never being kicked out again.

You hugged a pillow, longed for the stuffed rabbit that you’d had as a child and that your father hadn’t packed for you, and sobbed.

A few months after that, over dinner, you asked your aunt about the  _ vela _ s.

“Why do you light them?”

“I light them in prayer,” she said. “I light them to ask forgiveness for the sins that we can’t help but commit, because we’re human.”

You nodded, and then reached to serve yourself more salad.

“Have you always lit them?” you asked her.

“No. Only since you came to live with me.” She smiled at you. “Before that, I didn’t have anyone to pray for.”

You smiled back at her, but your heart broke: She had to  _ pray _ for you. You were a  _ sinner _ .

In the months leading up to that evening, you’d become more comfortable with your aunt. You’d begun, slowly, quietly, to think that maybe she could really feel like your family. You could really be  _ home _ with her. 

But she thought you were a sinner. She needed to  _ pray _ for you. 

Something tightened itself into a fist in your chest. 

Over the coming days and weeks, you pulled back. You could tell that she noticed; you could see the ways that she reached out to you, with home-made cookies and suggestions that you go to the movies, but you couldn’t bring yourself to reach back.

The week you turned sixteen, you got a job bagging groceries at the Hy-Vee.

By the time you left for college, she had quietly given up on trying to be close with you. She checked in with you over the phone and had you home for Christmas, but you stayed in Lincoln for the summer, picking up extra shifts at your job waiting tables there. Between that and your scholarships and some loans, you were able to make ends meet.

(She put a hundred and fifty dollars into your account every month anyway, all the way until graduation.)

(You hated that, but weren’t too proud to take it. It helped.)

It wasn’t until more than a decade later, until  _ Alex _ , that you thought back on that interaction with your aunt and wondered if maybe you’d interpreted it all wrong.

Alex came out of the closet with all the bravery and recklessness of a bold Doberman puppy, overcoming her fears and insecurities and launching herself into your arms in the hope that you would catch her. And you didn’t, of course, though you’d like to think -- you  _ hope _ \-- that you were able to break her fall a little.

But a few weeks passed, and a few more, and you saw your dynamic with her shift and reorient at least a half-dozen times until, very suddenly, you realized that the only thing keeping you from her was your own fears: the fear that you were new and shiny, the fear that you were the first woman she thought of as available to her, the underlying certainty that you’d never,  _ never _ , be enough for someone like her in the long run, even though her feelings for you had been strong enough to drive her, brave and scared and determined, to accept, at the age of 28, that she had always been gay and had never really figured it out before. 

So you called up every ounce of your bravery and took what she had offered you, knowing full well that you would become addicted to her warmth and her ferocity. You hadn’t expected to see a sweeter side of her: a side that squealed when she was tickled, that sang in the shower, that once made an impromptu puppet out of a Thai food menu and voiced it like Elmo when you dared suggest, on a Friday, that you might actually cook for once.

Alex at her softest drew something hot and fierce and protective out of you. Something that made you want to take bullets for her. That made you want to put yourself between her and anything that could ever harm her.

You’d have lit candles for her every evening if you believed it would actually help keep her safe.

You wonder if maybe, all those years ago, that’s what your tía was doing for you.

 

\--

 

You clench your eyes closed and dig your nails into the pads of your palms, trying to erase the sense memory of the lock. You keep thinking you can still hear the blaring alarm.

Alex exhales and then quietly walks to the chair James left.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have been pacing in here. It’s not good for him.”

Your frustration dissipates a little. “It’s okay. I know you’re stressed out. How’s Kara?”

The other bed in the medbay is empty but rumpled. You know Supergirl must have been lying there to recharge earlier in the night, but you don’t know where she is now.

“She’s okay.” Alex unclenches her arms and pushes her hair back out of her face with one hand. “She’s got her powers back, but she’s still exhausted. She’s taking a nap in my office downstairs.”

“I guess it would have been hard to sleep in here with everyone fussing over Winn.”

“Yeah.” Alex stands up again and steps closer to the foot of his bed. “This isn’t how this was supposed to go,” she says quietly. You can tell she’s talking both to you and to him.

You inhale deeply. “Yeah, about that.”

She glances over her shoulder at you.

“I’m sorry.” You can still feel that damn lock, like it carved itself into your palm. “I’m sorry. I fucked it up.”

“No, you didn’t. You made a mistake.” She turns to look at Winn again. “ _ I _ fucked it up. I should have seen...” She trails off, then shakes her head. “I shouldn’t have  _ let _ him come. I shouldn’t have let  _ any _ of you come.”

“You would have been killed, Alex.”

Her nostrils flare, and she shakes her head. “But that was my call to make,” she says angrily. “And Winn wouldn’t be hurt, and you and James wouldn’t have…. ” 

You let her trail off. You’re feeling raw and ragged, and she is too, and you’re pretty sure you don’t actually want to know what she was about to say. You wouldn’t have triggered the alarm? You wouldn’t have put yourselves at risk? 

No, better to let the ether have the end of that sentence.

You decide, instead, to change the subject. “Hamilton says he’s going to be fine,” you say gently. “The bullet missed his kidney and the major arteries. It was really mostly muscle damage. She said that,” you gesture toward the IV stand where a bag of blood is hanging, “and rest are all he needs.” 

Alex drops her hands to his footboard and you see her knuckles turn white. “You know,” she says quietly, “he only bagged that blood six weeks ago. I was working a lot of extra hours then.” She swallows. “I went through our inventory and saw he’d never bagged anything. It’s policy. Every agent bags three pints, and we store it in chambers that keep it good for up to two years. So I asked him about it, and he said…”

She trails off.

“He said?” you nudge, and she startles a little, like you’ve brought her back to this world.

“He said he was afraid of needles,” Alex says slowly, “and that he was never out in the field anyway, so it didn’t matter. I dragged him up here and sat him down and told him to suck it up, and I gave him candy when it was done. Then, a week ago, we did it again. We were going to do the third pint in a few weeks.” 

“Well, that’s… that’s good timing?” you offer.

She laughs a little, drily, and raises her hands to push her hair back out of her face, holding it there. “You know I’ve never used my banked blood. Even with the Daxamites and the Worldkillers, I never needed it.”

Her fingers are woven into her hair, her palms holding her skull, and you can see smears of grime and traces of blood on her neck. She’s changed out of her blood-sodden clothing into a clean set of DEO blacks, and she’s washed her face and hands, but traces of the fight cling to her still. 

The blood will irritate her skin, you know. She’ll start itching.

Parts of you want to reach up and wipe it away.

There was a time, in your past, where you could have done just that. Licked your thumb, wiped away the blood, and then gone to wash your hands or, hell, just wiped your thumb on your jeans.

She looks so lost, and so adrift, and every part of you screams to reach for her, to tug her into you, to promise that you’ll hold her up if she wants to break.

But you don’t get to do that anymore. You haven’t for years. And she doesn’t want you to, anyway. 

“ _ I’m _ the one who’s supposed to get shot,  _ not you _ , Winn. That’s literally  _ what I’m here for _ .” She drops one hand and points at him, stabbing it into the air between then. “It’s  _ my  _ job to take the bullets, you  _ idiot _ .  _ You _ write the code,  _ I _ take the goddamn gunfire.”

Her fingers wrap around his footboard again now, like she’s holding onto him by proxy, and she’s looking at him with this mix of fire and sadness, and you can tell that she probably has things she wants to say to him, even if he can’t hear her.

And she’d probably prefer not to have you in the room when she says them. 

“I could, uh, I think I could use a coffee.” You jerk your thumb toward the door. “Can I get you one?”

She shakes her head  _ no _ .

You walk around Winn’s bed and hover there for a moment, and then you do something you’ve never done before, for anyone:

You kiss his clammy forehead.

If that fucker ever died on you, you’d kill him, you swear you would.

Then you duck out and give them a moment alone.

 

\--

 

You make yourself a coffee in the break room and then hover by the Keurig machine for lack of anywhere else to go. 

Agents come in and out. You recognize the occasional one from joint ops you’ve run over the years: the hostage negotiation, the Worldkiller situation. Some of them remember you from before, from when you and Alex were still engaged. 

It’s a familiar face, Agent Fe, that appears in the break room doorway fifteen minutes later. He was actually at your bridal shower, you remember.

“Detective Sawyer,” he says, “Agent Danvers sent me down here to get you. Agent Schott woke up.”

You tear out of the break room and up the stairs, coffee abandoned on the break room counter, and see Alex sitting by Winn’s bed, smiling at him. James is there too, looking like himself and not like Guardian anymore. 

“Sawyer!” Winn slurs a little, grinning at you as you walk in. “Sawyerrrrrrr, give me some sugar!” He holds one hang out toward you, heedless of the IV in its back.

You grin at him and take that hand gently, standing opposite Alex and James. “Hey, buddy. How’re you feeling?”

“Oh man. Oh  _ man _ . I’m high as a  _ kite _ . This is weird. I had this foster brother once who -- let me tell you, he took this shit for  _ fun _ , and now, feeling this, I do not understand that, no sirree, not at all…”

James’s deep, rumbling laugh fills the room, and Alex looks like she’s trying not to laugh herself.

You tug your chair over with your foot. James threatens to record video of Winn’s drugged-up ramblings and post it on Instagram. Alex retorts that if he does, she’ll share the video  _ she _ secretly took of the impromptu Chippendales show he tried to give while standing on a chair, drunk, at his last birthday party.

“Oh my God,” you laugh, “What?!”

“There were  _ cowboy dance moves _ ,” Alex stage-whispers. “He was swinging his shirt over his head like a lasso.” 

“Yodelay-yodelay-yodelay-HEEHOOO!” Winn croons, and that’s it: all three of you are doubled over, cackling.

Later, you work out the important decisions. Winn will be in the DEO overnight, and will move to James’s guest room the following day. You’ll take turns there, the three of you, helping him with whatever he needs help with. You offer to go to Winn’s house and pick up his X-box and his VR set for his smartphone and bring them over to James’s.

By the time you finally leave the DEO, it’s about 8:00 am and you haven’t slept since the following day. You call your captain and take the day off.

You sleep better than you’ve slept in a long, long time.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I need to give a HUGE shout-out to [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/) for giving me an amazing beta on this chapter. Endings are brutally hard to write: they need to provide narrative and emotional resolution, they need to tie up all loose ends, and I think a lot of writers are exhausted by the time we write them. I know I am. It makes it very easy to choose the easiest, most accessible words and images, instead of the ones that are most effective.
> 
> So yeah. Thanks for kicking my ass about adverbs, @kelinswriter.
> 
> This ending was especially hard because, I think, I pushed a lot of my limits in writing this fic. It's been terrifying and rewarding and I know a lot of readers nope'd out early on, so I'm grateful to everyone who's stuck around. 
> 
> As always, I'm super behind on comment replies BUT I'LL GET TO THEM.
> 
> Fluffy epilogue to follow.

You set an alarm for noon, but dragging yourself awake feels like swimming through setting concrete. The skin under your eyes feels swollen. Everything in your body aches.

But you know that if you sleep any later, you’ll be living like you’re jetlagged for the following week.

(How did you survive those all-nighters in college, honestly? Have you really gotten that much older?)

You take a hot shower and then book a Lyft back downtown, to a Starbucks knock-off a block away from the DEO. The line drags a little with lunch orders, but eventually, you leave with a few coffees and a bag full of bagels with cream cheese packets.

(You’re not sure who the coffees are for, apart from the large one you got yourself. You figure it won’t be hard to pawn them off.)

(But you doctor one of the coffees the way Alex likes it.)

The rookies at the DEO security level aren’t people you know. One agent eyes your driver’s license suspiciously. The other pokes through your bag of bagels with a hand covered in a latex glove, and you try not to think about the bitter latex powder she’s getting all over your snacks. 

“Please, just call up to Agent Danvers and tell her that Detective Sawyer is here,” you say. “Or Director Henshaw. Or, hell,  _ Supergirl _ .”

Their eyes lock on your face at that. One of them taps an earpiece and turns away, muttering something into his communication device, while the other rolls your paper bag closed again and hands it back to you.

A minute later, Supergirl walks in through the revolving door behind you.

“She’s with me.” The way Kara’s voice sounds nothing at all like Kara will always unnerve you.

It’s enough for the rookies to let you through.

As a peace offering you hold out the bag of bagels. “Want one? I brought them to give away.”

They shake their heads curtly and wave you through.

Supergirl doesn’t look at you. She leads you to the elevator and assumes you’ll follow because, of course, you will. She hits the button and you stand there, beside her, awkwardly, while she, by all appearances, ignores you.

You clear your throat. “Um,” you say. “Coffee? Bagel?” You hold the tray of coffees, then the bag of bagels, toward her, one at a time. She turns to look at them, then lifts her eyes to her face. They’re impassive, bordering on suspicious. 

“No,” she says. “Thank you.”

And you know something must be wrong, because Kara never, ever turns down free food.

The elevator door opens and she gestures you inside. The door closes behind both of you.

“You know, at first I didn’t know what made me more mad,” she says finally. “What you did last night, or what you did six weeks ago.”

Of course she’s mad at you. You fucked up the raid. You fucked her sister and then you walked away.

“Then,” she continues, “I realized I was more mad about six weeks ago. Because if that hadn’t happened, I’m pretty sure Alex wouldn’t have pulled what she pulled yesterday.”

“Kara, I --”

“No offense, Maggie, but I really don’t want to hear it.”

The elevator dings open and you follow her out. She walks toward the hub and doesn't stop.

“They’re upstairs,” she throws over her shoulder. 

You look up and exhale. From where you’re standing, you can’t see the medbay. The tray of four coffees is starting to feel heavy in your hand. You want to trade hands with the bagels, but of course, you can’t move the coffees to the hand that has the bagels in it because that hand is full of the fucking bagels that apparently nobody, not even Supergirl, wants to eat.

You end up awkwardly setting everything down on the stairs so you can switch hands, and then you walk up.

The first thing you see through the medbay’s glass wall is Alex talking to James, her face drawn in that way it gets when she's totally wired and totally exhausted and stressed enough to be near snapping. Then she hands him a duffel bag, and your knees lock, because the sight of one person shoving a suitcase into another person’s hands will always, always unsettle you. It will always make you want to grab the suitcase and the person who comes with it and tell them that you’ll make it okay, whatever the problem is, whatever the reason they’ve been given for being told to pack up and leave. 

It’s a startling, visceral feeling, every time, to imagine what you’d do to help someone stop feeling unwanted. 

Winn is sitting up on his bed, looking tired and dejected.He’d probably go for a a bagel, you think. You have everyseed, and you know that’s his favorite.

So you shoulder your way through the door.

Alex is insistent and exasperated, pushing her fingers through greasy-looking hair. She still has blood smeared on the back of her neck. 

“—re sure,” she’s saying, “Because I can stay with him, I can stay on his couch for a week or two until he’s good on his own—“

“Alex,” James insists, “you need to sleep on a bed. And you’re strong, but Winn’s going to be dead weight for a few days, and I’m stronger than you.”

“And honestly,” Winn says, his voice tired and drawn, “you know I love you, Alex, but if I’m gonna need help taking a sponge bath or whatever, I’d rather get it from James.”

James raises his eyebrows at her, a wordless  _ see? _ , and Alex’s shoulders droop a little.

“Okay. But you both have my number. If there’s an emergency, you call me  _ before _ you call 911.” She turns to Winn and points at him. “I’m coming over  _ every day _ to check your stitches and change your dressing. If you need anything,  _ anything _ , you call me, I don’t care what time it is. In there, I packed you, um, I packed you, like, underwear and socks and stuff, and I found you a zip-up hoodie, and a couple t-shirts but mostly button-downs because getting t-shirts off and on is going to be hard for the first week, and--and--”

Alex’s eyes have drifted down to the duffel bag in James’s hand, so she doesn’t see the way he’s looking at her with concern, or the way Winn looks like he just wants to lie down again. You know this version of Alex. This is Alex after twenty-four hours on a case without sleeping. This is Alex the unstoppable force, faced with an immovable object.

You wish you’d brought her something other than caffeine.

You clear your throat and three sets of eyes suddenly notice you. James smiles gently. Winn looks relieved. And Alex looks like you might actually be the thing that pushes her over the edge into madness.

“I have bagels,” you say, “and coffee.”

“Oh, you beautiful human.” Winn gingerly reaches both hands out toward you.

You glance over at Alex. The bagel should be fine for him and you’re pretty sure the coffee should be fine, too, but she’s the one who really knows. But, perhaps more importantly, the power to make just one decision in Winn’s best interest right now might take a bit of that frantic edge out of her eyes.

She nods.

You hand Winn a coffee and let him choose a bagel (everyseed, like you predicted).

“Ready to go home, then?” you ask him.

“James’s place, for awhile,” he says, “but, I mean, at least not here.”

You set the bag of bagels and the rest of the coffees on the table by the bed. “You guys can have those,” you offer. Then you swallow. “One of them – I did one up for you, Alex. It has your name on it.”

She dives for the tray, checking the sides of the cups until she finds hers and then groaning almost indecently when she sips from it. Then, with a defeated look on her face, she digs into the bag of bagels and finds a plain one and tears out a huge bite with her teeth, mumbling a “thank you” around her mouthful.

James is a little more dignified about setting the duffel bag down by the door and coming to pick up the last coffee. “Thanks, Maggie.”

Your eye keeps drifting to the bag.

You imagine a kid, like you. A queer kid with a suitcase in front of a house like your aunt’s house.

You imagine Alex opening that door.

The scenes roll through your exhausted brain like frames on a zoetrope, flickering. Alex, smiling. Alex, reaching for that suitcase.

“Let me take that,” she offers.

Alex, slipping her arm around the kid’s shoulder.

Alex, saying “Welcome home.”

Alex, with that ferocity in her eyes that says  _ anything that would hurt you has to go through me _ .

The room settles into the sounds of chewing and sipping and nothing else. When the door opens, it startles all of you.

It’s Supergirl.

“Hey!” Alex asks, still too fast and frantic. “Dad?”

“Tranquilized,” Kara says. “Vasquez just got here. She’s going to run some scans on his arm to see if there’s a way to de-weaponize it but still let him use it as a functional limb, so that’s happening first. Then we can wake him up, and J’onn will read him to see if he can figure out how deep his programming runs.”

“Okay, well, I can help,” Alex says. “I just need to finish this and—”

“No,” Kara interrupts.

You’ve never heard Kara sound so firm against Alex before.

Alex cocks an eyebrow. “You suddenly have DEO rank, Kara?”

“This is from J’onn,” Kara says. “I just convinced him to let me be the one to tell you. You’re locked out until you get some sleep and a shower.”

“I’m—I’m  _ what _ ? No, Kara, I have the most expertise in—”

“No, you don’t, Alex,” Kara says, her voice softening. She walks over to Alex and cups her elbows gently. “You’re dead on your feet. You need to get some sleep and eat some real food, and then, when you get back,  _ then _ you’ll have the most expertise. You’re too fried right now to remember half of what you know. You know that.”

“Kara—“

“Don’t make me fly you home,” Kara warns. “I need to go help J’onn. We’re on watch in case Jeremiah wakes up during the scan.”

“I’ll take you home, Alex,” you offer quietly.

Kara spins on you, and for the first time, you find yourself on the wrong side of that haughty, judgmental stare.

“Come on, Kara,” you sigh, “you know she won’t go alone.”

Kara doesn’t say anything. She just keeps glaring at you. Wordlessly, you shrug, then down the last of your coffee and toss the cup into the trash in the corner. You turn to Winn.

“I’ll come over tomorrow,” you murmur. “There will be Mario Kart. You’re going  _ down _ , Luigi.”

“ _ Never _ , Princess Peach,” he retorts, and then laughs, and it’s the best thing you’ve heard in days.

He’s going to be okay.

Alex and Kara are still facing each other just beyond the foot of Winn’s bed, but their bodies turn ever-so-slightly toward you when you approach. Kara’s face is impassive. Alex looks defeated.

“Could you take the rest of those bagels down to the break room, Kara?” you ask, gesturing toward where you left the bag on the table. She sets her jaw and nods.

“Make sure she actually gets into bed and turns off the light and  _ sleeps _ ,” Kara says. “Don’t let her open her laptop.”

You set your jaw and bite back the sarcastic retort that wants to bubble up. Then you put your hand on Alex’s elbow. “Come on. Let’s go.”

She changes into street clothes while you wait for her outside the locker room, and then you walk the few blocks to her apartment without speaking.

The smell of the lobby -- some kind of Glade plug-in lavender not-quite-burying the electric smell of an old vacuum cleaner -- nearly floors you. You’re transported: you feel the weight of a duffel bag on your shoulder, your eyes swollen from crying, the traces of her hands on you under your clothes. The sense memory on your palm from last night, of the lock and the alarm, is overwhelmed by the sense memory of the cold metal wall of mailboxes where you stopped and braced yourself, heaving deep, gulping breaths, trying to keep yourself from completely breaking down right here, again, alone.

You breathed. And breathed. And dug up your phone to look up Danny’s address and order a Lyft. And breathed again. The bag on your shoulder made it hard to breathe, made it hard for your lungs to find room to expand, but you forced them with more strength than you knew you had -- the same strength it took you to pick up a suitcase outside a different home, all those years ago.

“Hey,” Alex says, her voice soft. 

It’s only then that you realize that you’ve frozen. She looks at you with kind eyes.

She understands. She’s a scientist; she knows how scent and place and memory work together. 

She hovers near you, waiting for you to snap out of your trance. “It’s okay,” she says, when you do. “You don’t have to come up. I’ll go to sleep. I promise.”

But you shake your head. She’s being honest: she was never good at lying to you. But you’re  _ thirty-one years old _ . You refuse to have yet another layer of yourself distilled into stale grief.

(If you let the grief win, you’d have nothing but layers of it coating your bones.)

In the elevator, you stand as far from her as you can manage.  

The apartment punches you in the throat with twice the strength of the lobby, but you swallow through the knot and walk to the kitchen.

“Shower,” you tell her. “I’ll make… I’ll make eggs or something.” Eggs, you know, are the one thing she’s pretty likely to have in the fridge. 

Hovering near the fireplace, she’s watching you with a mix of discomfort and fascination, eyebrows furrowed. You imagine it’s the face she’d make watching a squirrel prepare to jump from one icicle-covered branch to another: she’d both marvel at its strength and skill, and fear that its strength and skill would fail.

(Except that Alex has probably never seen an icicle in real life, ever.)

But she follows your instructions. You wait until you hear the shower start, and then you turn on the stove. Pretty much everything is still where you left it (and without much further wear, you notice, with a laugh to yourself). You make toast, and scramble two eggs, and there’s some turkey bacon in the fridge so you fry up a few slices of that, too. You’re just plating everything when the bathroom door opens, releasing a puff of steam into the apartment. Alex, when she comes out, is wearing a tank top and sweatpants -- and, you notice, a bra, which is strange only because it seems excessive when she’s just a few minutes away from sleep.

Even though you had her nipples between your teeth just a few weeks ago, she’s decided that the sight of her breasts through her shirt is too intimate to share with you now.

You push the plate across the island and pour her a glass of water.

“Where’s your food?” she asks.

You shrug. “Not hungry.”

“You should eat anyway.”

“I ate earlier.”

She gives up and picks up her fork.

You lean on the island, propped on your elbows, and look around the room while she eats. She’s replaced the sectional, you notice. The new one is dark blue and a little more overstuffed. It looks… cozier. 

You imagine, for a fraction of a second, what it would be like to wrap up in a blanket and sink into the corner.

“You really don’t have to stay,” Alex says to her eggs. “Even all that coffee couldn’t keep me awake much longer.”

“I promised your sister. In fact…” You dig your phone out of your pocket and snap a picture of Alex mid-chew.

She shakes her head in vague annoyance and looks down again.

 

\--

 

**You** (2:03 pm): Proof. [Picture]

**Kara** (2:04 pm): Thanks Maggie. 

**You** (2:05): np

 

\--

 

Alex finishes eating. You take her plate and put it in the sink while she goes to brush her teeth, and then, without a word, she walks toward her bed. 

You walk around the island and hover awkwardly while she gets under the covers.

You grab your jacket from where you left it over the back of a chair, and your phone and wallet from where you left them on the counter.

“You c’n watch some TV or something ‘f you want,” Alex slurs, her face half-buried in her pillow.

“No, Danvers, that’s okay.”

“You gonna go?” she asks.

“If that’s okay?” you reply.

You wait for her answer. And wait. And wait.

And then you realize, through her deep breathing, that she’s asleep.

 

\--

 

**You** (1:53 pm): I just left her. She’s asleep.

**Kara** (1:54 pm): Thanks, Maggie.

**Kara** (1:54 pm): I mean it. Thank you.

**You** (1:55 pm): It wasn’t a problem

**You** (1:56 pm): How are things with Jeremiah?

 

**Kara** (2:06 pm): No progress yet

 

\--

 

**Kara** (3:23 pm): Oh, hey, I forgot to say thanks for the bagels.

**Kara** (3:24 pm): I might have eaten three of them myself. And I gave one to Vasquez and one to Wong. So they didn’t actually make it to the break room.

**You** (3:25 pm): I’m just glad they got eaten, Kara. Let me know how things go with Jeremiah if you can.

 

\--

 

You go to a restorative yoga class that afternoon. The studio has a sauna in the back, so after the class, you wrap up in a towel and sit there for longer than is probably healthy or safe. You know there’s no science to the whole “toxins” thing, but as your muscles go soft and slack, it  _ feels  _ like you’re sloughing off something more than just water and salt. You want to purge yourself of all of it: of Alex’s apartment, of last night at Cadmus, of almost two years ago in the lobby of Alex’s building. All of it. 

When you finally leave, you stand by the changing room cooler and drink cup after cup of water. You imagine that you’ve drained yourself of sludge and grease and that now you’re topping yourself up with the clean and the fresh.

 

\--

 

**You** (6:29 pm): Stilton’s? I’ll pick it up and bring it over

**James** (6:30 pm): Sure, sounds great!

**Winn** (6:30 pm): MAGGIE SAWYER YOU ARE MY HERO

**You** (6:31 pm): AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT SCHOTT

**You** (6:31 pm): Requests?

**Winn** (6:31 pm): Pineapple!

**James** (6:31 pm): Just no pineapple

**Winn** (6:32 pm): HA MINE WENT THROUGH FIRST I WIN

**Winn** (6:32 pm): Also I’m the one that got shot, so

**Winn** (6:32 pm): Ha, I’m the Schott that got shot. I shoulda done this sooner

 

\--

 

**James** (6:32 pm): He’s a little loopy. But really, anything’s fine. You can be the tie-breaker on the pineapple, I don’t mind it that much

**You** (6:32 pm): lol. Oh, Winn. OK, will do

**James** (6:32 pm): And actually could you get one of their Greek salads? They’re so good. I’ll pay you back 

**You** (6:33 pm): Sure thing. Don’t worry about it. You’re still in your condo on Cherry street?

**James** (6:35 pm): Yep. Same place. 

 

\--

  
  


James greets you with a hug and takes the food off your hands. Behind him, you see Winn, dressed in a strange-looking combination of a button-down shirt with sweatpants. He gestures at you with his video game controller.

“Maggie!” he calls, “ever played Mario Kart on painkillers before? I am, like, possibly actually going to really fall off rainbow road here, if you know what I mean. It is  _ awesome _ .”

You sit beside him on the couch. He unpauses the game, and when he plays he’s a little more subdued than usual and the setting is easier than he’d normally play. But he seems like himself -- if a drugged-up, slightly hobbled version. 

You want to wrap your arms around him and hold him and tell you that he’s not allowed to  _ fucking _ leave you,  _ ever _ . He swore to you that there was nothing you could do to drive him away. 

 

\--

 

You visit Winn every day, sometimes on your lunch break and other times in the evenings. Sometimes you bring take-out and hang out and play video games. Often, you only stay long enough to lay eyes on Winn and to ask James if he needs help with anything. He always says no. 

Once, you cross paths with Alex in the hallway.

It’s awkward.

You hover opposite one another for a second or two before Alex says, “I was just changing the dressing.”

“Yeah, I figured.” You nod. “It look okay?”

“Yeah,” Alex nods. “He’s being careful with it.”

“Good.” 

“Yeah.”

A beat.

“Anyway,” you say, “I should head up?”

“Yeah,” she answers, “have a good visit. Don’t keep him up too late.”

And that, you think, is how that’s going to end.

 

\--

 

Except it doesn’t end there.

It doesn’t end there at all.

In fact, just two days later is the moment when it truly begins.

You’re at home, in sweatpants and a hoodie, deciding whether to do what you  _ should _ do (review those three casefiles you brought home with you) or what you  _ want _ to do (lie down on your couch and watch old episodes of  _ How to Get Away with Murder _ until you fall asleep). Viola Davis and Famke Janssen are winning out, so you’re at the bargaining stage --  _ just review one case file before you turn the TV on, you’ll be glad you did  _ \-- when someone knocks on your door.  

Your brain leaps to Winn. He’s hurt, or had a blood clot or worse, and where’s your phone,  _ where’s your phone _ , did you miss a text or a call, has someone tried to reach you?

The phone is in your hoodie’s kangaroo pocket. You fish it out. No missed calls, no missed texts, and the volume is turned up.

Another knock, and this time it makes you nervous, because unexpected visitors will never  _ not _ make you nervous. It’s your line of work, in part -- SciDiv has been building its file on Cadmus, slowly but surely, and when you get close enough, you know you’ll need to invest in some extra security. 

But it’s also the fact that for every surprise in your life that has turned into Winn becoming the best friend you’ve ever had, you’ve got three more that have turned into Alex dumping you, or Emily telling Alex about how you cheated on her, or your parents packing you a suitcase.  

You grab your gun from the edge of the kitchen counter and go check the peep-hole.

Later, you’ll wonder why you didn’t guess that it might be Alex. 

Later, you’ll wonder how, after everything -- her dad, Winn, the way you ghosted her after what the two of you did in the bar -- you ever thought she, in all her beautiful bravery and determination and bull-headedness, wouldn’t come to you demanding answers.

You set the gun on the key table and open the door for her.

Framed in the doorway, she blinks at you for a moment, like you’ve just turned on the lights in a dark room. Her bike helmet hangs from one hand and jitters against her leg.

“Alex,” you say, finally. “Hi.”

“I, um.” She shifts her weight to one foot, then the other, and glances down the hallway toward the elevator. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”

The meaning isn’t really hidden: she wasn’t sure if she wanted you to be here.

Because, as Alex does, she’s put all her energy and bravery into the setup and that’s left little for the execution. Standing there, faced with you, she doesn’t know what to do.

You glance over your shoulder at the clock on your stove. It’s 9:11 pm. “I don’t know where else I’d be.” 

The moment the words are out of your mouth, you realize how shitty they probably sound. You manage not to cringe and your first instinct is to apologize -- but whatever this conversation is, you’re not going to start it with an apology.

“Yeah,” she says, “You’re -- you’re right. I was thinking maybe with Winn, I guess, but yeah, this late -- I’m sorry.”

Well, fuck. Apparently  _ she’ _ s going to start it with an apology.

You sigh. “No, no. Don’t apologize.” You step back and open the door a little wider. “Come in. Want a beer? Or I’ve got some sparkling water in the fridge.”

“Sparkling water would be nice. Thanks.”

You open the fridge and reach to the back for the bottle of knock-off Perrier. You hear her set her helmet on the counter, and then her soft footfalls against your living room carpet. This apartment is more open than anywhere you’ve lived apart from the place you shared with her. In that apartment, you could tell where she was by the sound of her footsteps: the dense rug of the living room; the thicker, more plush one under the dining table; the hardwood everywhere else, each sounding different degrees of muted or hollow. 

Lying in bed, in that apartment, with your eyes closed, you could listen to Alex moving around and picture exactly where she was. 

This apartment has wall-to-wall carpet. It’s not terrible. It was replaced before you moved in, and the color is a cool, modern shade of grey. But the PD will never make the paychecks of a black-ops force. And while you do like this apartment, you can’t imagine learning the sounds of another person moving around in it.

“Did you get my address from Winn?” You open the bottle and reach for two glasses.

“No.” The zipper on her sleeve catches in her hair as she runs a palm over her scalp, and she scowls a little, tugging it free. “I remembered the building from that time I dropped you off here. And then your name was on your mailbox.”

You remember once, a long time ago, picking Kara’s name off a bank of mailboxes when you decided you had to do something to keep Alex from walking away from you for good. 

Alex leans against the arm of the sofa and watches you walk to her. When you hand her the drink she stands again, looking adrift, until you wave for her to sit down properly on the couch.

You take the armchair across from her. “So. What’s up?”

She leans forward, her elbows on her knees, holding the glass with her fingertips. Her eyes settle on the floor, kind of angled toward you, but landing on the floor somewhere on the opposite side of the coffee table. She inhales and you hear a wobble, a tremor of sadness you haven’t heard in a long, long time.

“I just…” she starts. “I don’t understand, Maggie.”

Here it comes: the river and the ocean, colliding.

“You don’t understand,” you echo. “Understand what?”

“You?” It comes out somewhere between a laugh and a cry. “Us? You, dropping everything to help me on a suicide mission like that.”

You take a sip of your drink, mostly to delay having to answer.

You don’t really know why you did it, honestly.

(Yes you do.)

“I guess….” You sigh. “I guess, I mean, the last time you tried to go after your dad, I said I’d always help you, so.”

“Is that why you took me home, then?” she asks, a little stronger now. “Is that why you made me eggs and tucked me in and checked in with my sister for me?”

“I -- there was…” You inhale sharply. “There was nobody else.”  

“Come on, Maggie. We broke up almost two years ago. This isn’t the first time J’onn’s insisted that somebody supervise me like that. There were a half-dozen agents that could have escorted me home.”

“They wouldn’t have made you eggs.”

“No, Maggie, they wouldn’t have. That’s exactly my point.”

She takes a sip of her drink, finally, and then sets her glass on the coffee table. 

“I don’t understand who I am to you anymore,” she whispers.

And oh, God, here it is, that feeling welling up in your gut again, of the bottom dropping out from under you and your stomach crashing up into your throat.

Will you ever be done feeling this way about her?

The most straightforward answer is probably best, even if it might come across a bit dickish. So that’s what you go with. “You’re my ex-fiancée, and I’m yours.” 

“Exes.” She huffs a dry laugh. “That’s what you’re going with?”

But no: ex- _ fiancées _ is what you’re going with. You’re the person who thought you could love Alex, desire her, and put her first for the rest of your life. You’re the person she thought that about, too, for herself.

“I think you know that’s not what I mean.”

“No, Maggie, I don’t think I do. Because I just, I can’t put together how the same person who dropped everything to help me on a suicide mission and then made sure I ate dinner and slept could also have refused to call me back after… after  _ fucking _ me like you did.”   


There’s something dirty, something ashamed, in the way she utters the word. The two of you, together, never called sex “fucking,” really. There were occasions, in the throes of things, when the word would come out:  _ Please fuck me I can’t wait anymore, _ or  _ Are you ready for me to fuck you?, _ or  _ How do you want me to fuck you, Baby _ ? But you were always a couple for euphemisms, the rest of the time: you’d ask if you could take her to bed, she’d offer to go down on you, you’d talk about  _ intimacy _ or  _ sleeping together  _ or you’d just call it  _ sex _ . 

What you did together was never, ever  _ fucking _ .

Because  _ fucking _ sounded like what people did in bar bathrooms.

“I just… I don’t know,” you say.

Outside, a siren drives by. Ambulance, not police.

“You don’t know,” Alex echoes, and then shakes her head in disbelief. “Of course you don’t.” And her dismissive tone, her obvious frustration, drives something shocking straight up your spine. 

You sit up straighter. “Okay, fine. Maybe I do know. Maybe I remember, very clearly, the last time you went rogue after Jeremiah. We were in your apartment, and the DEO had just cut you off, and Kara had agreed with J’onn’s decision, and you assumed that I would agree with them, too. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I told you I’d always be on your side, Danvers, and I guess I meant it.” 

Fingertips pressed to her lips, she shakes her head, her eyes still averted somewhere beside and below you. Her eyes glisten, and you take another sip just to give yourself something to do.

Because it’s possible that you didn’t know how hung up you still were, not really, until just seconds ago, when you said those words.

So you wait.

“I lost my job,” is what she says, finally. Quiet, like the words are escaping of their own volition.

It surprises you only because you’d kind of assumed that if she were going to be penalized for breaking the rules, it would have happened by now. You know this can’t be the first time since your breakup that she’s put the DEO at risk because she thought her own plan was better than the official strategy. You know that when you were together, she ran her own off-books ops at least twice. 

But your heart breaks for her anyway. “Shit, Alex. I’m sorry.” 

She’s trembling. Despite how standoffish she’s being, and how upset with you she clearly is, a part of you aches to reach out to her. You imagine yourself putting your hand on her knee, and you can feel it so clearly: the shape of her muscle through the weave of denim under your palm. You’d slide your hand up a bit, just an inch or two, and press your thumb into that hollow just above the joint. You know that if you rubbed there she’d go slack, her whole body, that twitchy knee tipping to the side. In your imagination, she’d sag into you, warm and trusting, like she used to. 

You tighten both hands around your water glass instead. “What happened -- are you demoted? Or out altogether?”

“Demoted, technically. I’ve lost two levels of clearance and been removed from field duties. I’m basically a lab monkey now.”

“Shit.” You wish you had something more insightful to say; ideas to offer instead of just words. “Well, how’s that going?”

“Sucks.” She shrugs. “Took a big pay cut, so I’m probably going to have to move. I’m working with Vasquez a lot until Winn gets back, and she keeps forgetting that she doesn’t need to call me ‘ma’am’ anymore.” 

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Her shoulders slump in defeat. “I asked J’onn if he thought I could work my way back up to my old rank, and he said that he’d create an advisory panel and recuse himself from the decision because he didn’t think he could be impartial. And the really fucked up thing is, I don’t even know which side he’s biased toward.“

There’s a droop to her tone: the sense of betrayal layered beneath the resigned understanding that, of course, she couldn’t help but fail the people whose respect she desires most.

She understands this decision against her, but resents it nonetheless.

You know that feeling well.

“Know what’s ironic? I don’t even have clearance to see my dad in holding. Someone has to swipe me in and supervise when I want to talk to him.”

You laugh a little at that. “What, are they afraid you’ll break him out or something?”

She shrugs. “Probably.”

“Alex--”

“I won’t, Maggie. I wouldn’t. But still, I’m not going anywhere until we’ve got him deprogrammed and  _ safely, legally  _ out of a cell. They’ve got me over a barrel on that. But after that, I don’t know. I might leave. If I’m going to be stuck in a lab, I might as well do it over at L-Corp where the pay’s a lot better and nobody would need to convene a panel to decide whether to promote me.”   

“You could do something totally different,” you suggest. “Go work in alien advocacy, maybe? Or you could join the real FBI, after faking it for all these years? Or, hell, I’m almost scared to suggest it, but you’d make a good cop. Just don’t choose my precinct.”

Alex laughs a little at that, and the vise loosens around your heart. 

“And, hey,” you offer quietly, “I mean, it’s probably better to be out of the field when you have a kid, right?”

Her breath rushes out of her. “A kid. Right.”

You don’t understand the dismissiveness in her tone.

“I’m sure you’ll work something out, Alex. You always do.”

She stands again and starts pacing.

“See, this,” she gestures toward you when her back is turned, “this is what I don’t understand. How you can sit here and be so nice to me when--”

She turns around and wipes at her eye with a knuckle.

“When?” you prompt.

You know what she’s going to say, but some masochistic part of you, the one that feels most at home when someone’s expressing their disappointment with you, wants to hear her say it.

“When it was so easy for you, two months ago, to act like I didn’t matter to you.”

There it is.

“Of course you matter to me, Alex.”

“Do I? Did I then? Because honest to God, Maggie, I have never....” Her voice cracks. “I have  _ never _ felt like such a piece of meat to someone, ever, in my life.  _ Ever _ .”

At her lowest point, at her loneliest and most desperate before J’onn recruited her, Alex admits to having done stupid, degrading things: drunk makeouts with strangers against brick walls in alleys behind some of National City’s higher-end meat-market nightclubs, letting drunk fratboys shove their thick hands up her shirt, even giving giving a couple of bathroom hand-jobs to wannabe corporate hacks whose names she never asked to know.    
Alex knows that you know this part of her history. 

She knows that you know that she’s saying that what you did with her in the bathroom of the bar left her feeling worse than all of those ill-advised drunk hookups.

And, goddammit, now you might cry.

You swallow hard. “I never wanted you to feel that way.”

She wheels on you. “I don’t understand why you didn’t just  _ talk _ to me, Maggie. That’s all it would have taken. If you’d acknowledged  _ even one _ of my texts, it would have helped me feel like I was more than just a body to you.”

Her words lodge somewhere in your esophagus. Your body wants to reject them like poison, repulsed by the very idea that Alex Danvers could ever be reduced to just a body for you. 

“You--”  you cough, clear your throat, and try again, “You were the one who invited me into that bathroom, Alex. I would never have started it.”

“I--I know, I, because--” she growls a little, clenching her fist in frustration in the air between you, and then strides forward and drops back into the seat she left empty on the couch. “I didn’t want  _ that _ .”

“You didn’t want what? Sex?” Memories bubble up of your interaction that evening, of the subtle invitation in her eyes and her movements, of the sound of the door clicking closed behind you, of the way she grabbed you by the jacket and tugged you into her.

_ She _ grabbed  _ you _ . You’re sure of it.

“Yes, I wanted sex.” Alex pinches the bridge of her nose. “I wanted sex, I wanted  _ you _ , I wanted… I wanted some version of what we did in there. But I wanted a different version. One where you let me touch you and kiss you and maybe, I don’t know, buy you a drink or breakfast or something.”

There’s a pretty big difference, you think, between following sex with a drink and following it with breakfast. But at the same time her words feel like pebbles, little weights settling into the hollow of you, and you can’t tell whether they’re made of gold or of lead. You feel too antsy to sit still but too burdened to move, and you understand, all at once, where the idea of someone “cracking” comes from. You feel rising up in you the impulse to  _ do _ , though you’re not sure what, exactly. It’s an urge toward violence, and toward sex, and toward screaming and door-slamming and, your perpetual favorite: hiding. 

You clamp your hands around the couch cushions and wish they’d give you the satisfaction of tearing.

“I couldn’t do that with you, Danvers.” You take a deep breath. “That gets way too close to acting like we’re something we’re not.”

“I--I know, I know, I just…” For the first time in all of this, she looks you square in the eye. “I never figured out how to stop wanting you, Maggie.”

The words hang in the air for a moment before they slip into your lungs with your breath. They hit your diaphragm and want to leap back out of you; they want to be said back to her, in your voice, with your name swapped out for hers. 

Because every time you imagine her and a kid and a suitcase, she’s not the one doing the packing. She’s the one coming down the steps from the porch and picking it up, putting her arm around the kid’s shoulders, drawing them back inside. She’s saying, with everything in her body and sometimes with words too, that she’ll be that kid’s safest place.

Sometimes, at your weakest, you acknowledge that when you imagine this, it’s from the perspective of the person standing in the doorway of the house. You watch the car drive away as Alex walks this kid up the stairs. 

You take the suitcase from her as she leads the kid into your house.

You smell a lit match, and feel presence and stillness.

But wanting you and loving you aren’t the same thing, after all this time. She’s looking at you with desperation she’s struggling to contain, and a surge of new frustration bubbles up in you, because when,  _ when _ , will she stop needing you to teach her things?

“You’re all I’ve ever wanted, Alex,” you say, resigned. “But you can’t always get what you want.” 

“I know.” She leans forward, toward you, bending her elbows down to her knees, and looks down again. “I was with Ora for almost as long as I was with you. She was starting to talk about serious things. Our future.” She swallows. “Kids. And I thought -- I kept thinking, you know, that I’d get to where I could see that with her, but I just….” Her eyes flit up to yours and she laughs a little. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had to break up with an Ursinian. I don’t recommend it. I stayed at Kara’s for two weeks for protection.”

You aren’t sure what to say to that. “I’m sorry to hear that,” you try. “I mean, it would have been perfect, right?”

“No, Maggie, it wouldn’t have. That’s the whole point.”

The tell-tale tremble in her voice gives away that she’s about to cry. 

“When I imagine a kid, when I imagine myself as a mom, it’s always -- it’s always in a family.” She rubs at her eyes with her knuckles. “It’s me, and another mom, raising this kid together, all of us having a home together. And that idea, Maggie, it still makes me feel so warm inside, so full. I just, I don’t even have words.”

She tips her eyes up, like she’s trying to hold the tears in, but it doesn’t work. She pushes at them with her fingertips.

“But without the other mom -- the  _ right _ other mom, the one who makes me feel safe and loved and who feels safe and loved with me -- I can’t imagine having the kid without her. And you, Maggie, you made that so easy for me to imagine. I imagined that for us and I, I  _ ached _ with longing for it.”

At some point, you must have released the couch cushions and wrapped your fingers together. You’re clenching them so hard that your knuckles are white.

“But with Ora, I couldn’t imagine any of it. And before that, there was a while when I was spending a lot of time with Ruby -- you remember Sam? Her kid -- and it just, it didn’t feel right. She’s a great kid, but like, I couldn’t -- I just couldn’t--” Her voice breaks, her thought left unfinished.

She swallows and starts again. “That day at the bar, I was so happy, you remember? I was so glad to see you there, because that same day, I’d had this epiphany. This, everything I’m telling you. I realized it then.” Her eyes shoot up, bloodshot and tired-looking and determined. “I realized that being a mom isn’t everything to me now like it was back then. That maybe it never was, and I just didn’t understand that. I realized that wanting you,  _ missing _ you, was more constant in my life than any image I had of being a parent.”

“Alex--”

“I was going to call you,” she presses on. “I was going to ask you on a date. I was going to bring you flowers, and I was going to take you for a nice dinner, and I was going to see if maybe, maybe, we could have another chance together, if I told you we didn’t have to have kids. And this idea, imagining a future with you again,  _ just _ with you -- it gave me so much more happiness than any other future I’d imagined for myself since we broke up, Maggie.”

Your face is wet. You’re crying. When did you start crying?

“And then we talked like old times, standing there in line,” she goes on, “and God, it was so stupid.  _ So stupid _ . I’d been thinking about you all day, and how happy you made me, and I was so excited for the future I was letting myself imagine for us, and I just -- I skipped a step.” She laughs, but her laughter sounds like an apology. “Or six. But I was so eager to -- to feel close to you again.”

She inhales to the bottom of her lungs, wipes at her eyes one last time, and then wipes her fingertips on the knees of her jeans. Her half-drunk glass of seltzer has been abandoned on the coffee table. “Anyway. I don’t know. I don’t even know why I’m here. To hammer the nails in the coffin, I guess. I don’t know. Thanks for the drink.”

Nausea surges inside you at the awareness that she’s about to walk away from you again. 

You’re on your feet before you notice that you’ve moved. “Alex. Alex, wait.”

She’s taken the two steps to the counter, her hand resting on her helmet. 

She turns, and now you’re the one tugging at the ends of your sleeves, your weight shifting from foot to foot. A million feelings and thoughts and desires surge through you, through all the parts of your body, and you can feel yourself shaking with them, and when you open your mouth you don’t know which of them is going to overflow out into words.

“We could adopt a kid,” is what comes out.

She stares at you like you’re nuts.

“Maybe?” you backtrack. “One day? I just -- I think of you and me, being a family for some kid who needs one, and I just…” 

Her eyes, impassive, fix on you.

“I think I could maybe want that?” you finish, scuffing your shoes against the rug. “Because you could give so much to some kid like that, and I could -- I could -- I don’t know. Help, I guess?”

She stares at you as you pick at a thread on your sleeve, her mouth a little open, like she can’t figure out what to say. 

In the past hour she’s been so open with you, she’s given so much of herself, and you already know you’re never going to crawl out of this pit of unrequited love you’ve been living in for two years.

You might as well go all-in.

“I’m so fucked over you,” you say, because eloquence is definitely your thing. “I keep thinking I’ve made my peace with it but then I just… I want all of you. I want all the things that you want. But then I wonder if  what I’m really wanting is you from two years ago, and I don’t, I don’t even know who you are now, and you don’t know who I am anymore. That night at the bar it was… it felt like this chance to have this little piece of who we were and I couldn’t handle trying to think about what it meant for who we  _ are _ . So I tried to force us to just… not be anything.”

She furrows her brow at you. You’re pretty sure you’re not making any sense.

“I don’t know how to have you not be anything to me,” Alex says. “Maybe that’s our problem now.”

“Neither do I.” You hold your hands out to her, palms up, as if to show her how empty they are.

And Alex -- beautiful, brave Alex, who’s always sucked at communicating but is  _ so much better _ with words than you are -- squares her shoulders and takes a step toward you. She opens her mouth twice, three times, without saying anything. When she speaks, she speaks softly. “I want to get to know you again. I want to see if we can be something to each other again. If maybe… if we’re both reimagining our futures, then maybe we can reimagine them together.”

You nod as hard as you can, like your head is on a hinge, because you can’t find words. Your hands come together and grip one another as tight as they can.

“Okay.” Her eyes, wide and warm and hopeful, gaze at you. “So -- so how do we start?” 

You stammer. “Um--um, dinner? Tomorrow?”

The smile that edges across her face is nervous, but hopeful. “Okay. Yeah. That sounds good.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Your fingertips tingle with the desire to touch her skin. Your lips burn with the desire to find hers.

Instead, you breathe, and you smile at her, and she smiles back.

You have time.

This time, you’ll have time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've got a little spare cash, consider a donation to the [Maggie Matters Fundraiser](https://my.truecolorsfund.org/fundraiser/1396280) for the True Colors Fund, an amazing organization that works to end LGBT youth homelessness.


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/) for the perfect feedback on this epilogue.
> 
> Shout-out to [performativezippers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/performativezippers/) whose style inspired the way I wrote this part.

**Winn** (9:28 am): Hey Maggie

 **Winn** (9:28 am): How’s your morning going?

 **You** (9:29 am): Well, I’m still in bed

 **You** (9:29 am): Watching my girlfriend making us coffee and breakfast

 **You** (9:29 am): Naked

 **You** (9:30 am): So I’d say it’s going pretty great

 **Winn** (9:30 am): OKAY OKAY TMI TMI

 **Winn** (9:30 am): TEE EMM AYE

 **Winn** (9:31): Alex will always be 50% sister and 50% boss and therefore I have double reason to NEVER want to think about her naked

 **You**  (9:31 am): lol

 **You**  (9:31 am): I mean you asked!

 **Winn** (9:32 am): I asked how your morning was going!

 **Winn** (9:32 am): Not how much clothing Alex is wearing!

 **Winn** (9:33 am): And why are you making her do all the morning work while you lie in bed, you lazy bum!

 **You** (9:34 am): Oh, Winn

 **You** (9:34 am): I did most of the work last night, so

 **Winn** (9:34 am): COME ON SAWYER

 **Winn** (9:35 am): STOP IT

 **You** (9:35 am):  >:D

 **You** (9:35 am): You love me

 **Winn** (9:36 am): You know I do

 **You** (9:36 am): Joking aside, it’s not every day your gf finds out she got a paper accepted by Nature

 **Winn** (9:37 am): True

 **Winn** (9:37 am): That’s so badass

 **You** (9:38 am): I know right? And Kara’s over the moon

 **You** (9:38 am): Because Lena is second author

 **You** (9:38 am): She wasn’t sure how they’d get along working together at L-Corp

 **Winn** (9:39 am): Yeah, I know

 **Winn** (9:40 am): Two strong personalities and all

 **You** (9:40 am): Right. But it’s been great.

 **Winn** (9:41 am): Yeah

 **Winn** (9:41 am): So how’s the apartment-hunt going, by the way?

 **You** (9:42 am): Good! We have a viewing this afternoon that we’re pretty optimistic about

 **You** (9:42 am): It’s over by NCU so it’ll be convenient for Alex next semester when she’s teaching that xenobio class

 **You** (9:43 am): And she has this idea to pitch a medical practices class. How to talk to your alien patients, avoiding biases and cultural assumptions

 **Winn** (9:43 am): Dude

 **Winn** (9:43 am): That’s cool

 **You** (9:43 am): Right?!?!

 **You** (9:44 am): The dept head is interested but not sure how to fit it in

 **You** (9:44 am): He’s putting her in touch with the anthropology department to maybe do a cross-listed thing

 **Winn** (9:45 am): Listen to you, Maggie

 **Winn** (9:45 am): You’re so in love

 **Winn** (9:45 am): It’s sickening

 **Winn** (9:45 am): (and adorable)

 **You** (9:46 am): I’M NOT SICKENING

 **Winn** (9:46 am): ...Maggie...

 **You** (9:46 am): …okay fine

 **You** (9:46 am): I’m a little sickening

 **Winn** (9:47 am): And adorable

 **You** (9:47 am): And adorable. Sure.

 **Winn** (9:47 am): NCU is a little far from the precinct, isn’t it?

 **You** (9:48 am): Compared to my current place, yeah

 **You** (9:48 am): But it’s about the same distance as Alex’s place, just in the other direction

 **Winn** (9:48 am): Oh, yeah, good point, and the traffic’s probably not as bad over there

 **You** (9:48 am): Exactly

 **You** (9:49 am): And if they actually finish building that light rail by next year I could actually commute on that

 **Winn** (9:49 am): Dude they’re never gonna finish that light rail

 **Winn** (9:49 am): It’s been “next year” for like five years

 **You** (9:50 am): Yeah, yea soiling thru for boing34256

 **Winn** (9:51 am): ...uh…

 **Winn** (9:52 am): Maggie?

 **Winn** (9:54 am): …Maggie?

 **Winn** (9:57 am): …. Okayyyy, I think I lost you

 **Winn** (10:00 am): Text me again when you can - I actually want to ask you about something

 

\--

 

 **You** (10:33 am): Sorry! Sorry

 **You** (10:33 am): She just

 **You** (10:33 am): She’s so hot

 **You** (10:33 am): Sometimes she just stands or moves in exactly the right way and I just

 **You** (10:33 am): my brain short-circuits I guess

 **Winn** (10:34 am): MAGGIE STOP IT

 **You** (10:34 am): and then we ate breakfast

 **You** (10:34 am): No no! I’m not even being dirty or lascivious or whatever this time

 **Winn** (10:34 am): Look at you and your GRE words

 **Winn** (10:35 am): Like you’re about to move in with a college professor

 **You** (10:35 am): LOL

 **You** (10:35 am): Adjunct professor

 **You** (10:35 am): L-Corp still pays the bills

 **You** (10:35 am): But really

 **You** (10:36 am): She was just standing by the window before and the sun hit her through a gap in the curtain and just

 **You** (10:36 am): It was totally G-rated. She’s so beautiful.

 **Winn** (10:36 am): You’re so screwed.

 **You** (10:37 am): I know

 **You** (10:37 am): She’s over there reading the paper and being so indulgent of me sitting here texting you

 **You** (10:38 am): I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since we got back together

 **You** (10:38 am): Anyway - Sorry, you wanted to ask me something and I’m being blubbery over my girlfriend. What’s up?

 **Winn** (10:39 am): Well, funny you should mention girlfriends…

 **You** (10:39 am): WINSLOW SCHOTT JUNIOR

 **You** (10:39 am): ARE YOU SEEING SOMEONE???

 **You** (10:39 am): TELL ME EVERYTHING SO I CAN PREPARE MY SHOVEL TALK

 **Winn** (10:40 am): Well, uh

 **Winn** (10:41 am): Hold on to that shovel for a sec

 **Winn** (10:42 am): Because you might want to use it on me instead of her

 **You** (10:42 am): … what?

 **You** (10:42 am): Winn, what are you doing?

 **Winn** (10:44 am): Well

 **Winn** (10:44 am): You know how I moved a few months ago after I got that promotion

 **You** (10:45 am): Yeah, of course, your new place is baller

 **Winn** (10:45 am): Thanks

 **Winn** (10:45 am): Anyway

 **Winn** (10:46 am): So I was grocery shopping like a month ago

 **Winn** (10:47 am): And I ran into this girl I used to know

 **You** (10:47 am): Winn… you’re stalling

 **Winn** (10:48 am): Listen, Maggie

 **Winn** (10:48 am): You’re the one who told me that nobody can rush a coming out process

 **You** (10:48 am): Wait wait

 **You** (10:49 am): ...you just said girl. Are you coming out?

 **Winn** (10:50 am): THERE ARE DIFFERENT KINDS OF COMING OUT, MAGGIE

 **Winn** (10:50 am): YOU TAUGHT ME THAT TOO

 **You** (10:50 am): Okay, okay, sorry. Go on.

 **Winn** (10:51 am): Thank you

 **Winn** (10:52 am): So I ran into this girl I used to know

 **Winn** (10:53 am): And we were chatting in the produce section and she was like “hey, we should hang out more, it’s been too long”

 **Winn** (10:54 am): So I said sure, thinking, you know, just as friends

 **Winn** (10:55 am): So we got coffee a couple times

 **You** (10:55 am): This reads like an adorable meet-cute

 **You** (10:56 am): I’m excited to see where it ends

 **Winn** (10:56 am): Well, don’t get too excited

 **Winn** (10:57 am): So we got coffee a couple times

 **Winn** (10:57 am): Then dinner

 **Winn** (10:57 am): Then we went to see that show at the Jukebox last week, the one you couldn’t go to with me

 **You** (10:58 am): I wondered who you went with, glad you found someone

 **Winn** (10:58 am): Yeah

 **Winn** (10:59 am): Well

 **Winn** (11:00 am): That night after the show

 **Winn** (11:01 am): She kissed me

 **You** (11:01 am): WINSLOW SCHOTT

 **Winn** (11:01 am): I wasn’t expecting it

 **You** (11:02 am): WHY DID YOU WAIT A WEEK TO TELL ME THIS

 **You** (11:02 am): WHEN DO I GET TO MEET HER

 **Winn** (11:03 am): Well, that’s the thing

 **Winn** (11:03 am): You already know her

 **You** (11:03 am): What? Who?! Is it that girl you used to work with at CatCo?

 **Winn** (11:03 am): NO

 **You** (11:04 am): Stop stalling! Who is it???

 **Winn** (11:04 am): Okay

 **Winn** (11:05 am): I have sort of kind of by accident

 **Winn** (11:05 am): been dating

 **Winn** (11:05 am): okay I’m literally shaking right now

 **Winn** (11:06 am): please don’t hate me

 **You** (11:06 am): WINN

 **Winn** (11:06 am): ...Vaya.

 **Winn** (11:06 am): I’ve been dating Vaya.

 **You** (11:07 am): WINSLOW SCHOTT JUNIOR

 **Winn** (11:07 am): And I really hope that’s okay because I really like her

 **Winn** (11:07 am): But you’re my Number 1 so if it’s not okay with you then I’ll call it off

 **You** (11:07 am): WINN

 **You** (11:08 am): Hang on I need to bring Alex into this

 **Winn** (11:08 am): Oh, no

 **Winn** (11:09 am): You really don’t

 **Winn** (11:10 am): Maggie? You really don’t!

 

You have added **Alex Danvers** to the conversation.

 

 **Alex** (11:12 am): Okay

 **Alex** (11:12 am): What’s so important that you couldn’t tell me with your actual voice, Maggie

 **Alex** (11:13 am): (Hi, Winn)

 **Winn** (11:13 am): Hi Alex

 **Winn** (11:13 am): And might I say you look lovely today

 **Alex** (11:13 am): ...uh

 **Alex** (11:14 am): I haven’t showered yet and you don’t know what I look like right now

 **Winn** (11:14 am): Come on, Alex

 **Winn** (11:14 am): It’s the spirit of it, can’t a guy compliment his pal?

 **You** (11:15 am): Winn, you’re stalling again

 **You** (11:15 am): Alex, what I brought you here to tell you

 **Alex** (11:15 am): Yes?

 **You** (11:16 am): Is that Winn

 **Winn** (11:16 am): Oh jeez

 **You** (11:16 am): Is dating

 **Alex** (11:16 am): Wait what?!?!

 **You** (11:16 am): VAYA

 **Alex** (11:16 am): OMG

 **Alex** (11:17 am): WINN

 **You** (11:17 am): I know, right?!?!

 **Winn** (11:17 am): I

 **Winn** (11:18 am): uh

 **Winn** (11:18 am): I don’t understand any of this

 **Winn** (11:18 am): Is this bad?

 **You** (11:19 am): Alex, you wanna explain it?

 **You** (11:19 am): ...when you stop giggling?

 **Alex** (11:20 am): Can’t

 **Alex** (11:20 am): laughing to hrd

 **You** (11:21 am): She really is

 **You** (11:21 am): It’s pretty funny

 **Winn** (11:21 am): I’m so confused. Do I need to break it off with Vaya?

 **You** (11:21 am): Winn

 **You** (11:22 am): You’re my best friend

 **You** (11:22 am): Dating my ex-girlfriend

 **You** (11:22 am): Who has made out with my current girlfriend

 **Winn** (11:23 am): Vaya made out with Alex? What? When?

 **You** (11:23 am): Who is also one of your best friends

 **You** (11:23 am): And is the sister of a girl you used to be in love with

 **Winn** (11:23 am): Yeah, thanks for that reminder

 **You** (11:24 am): Do you understand what this means?

 **Winn** (11:24 am): Um, no

 **Winn** (11:25 am): That I’m the worst, right? It’s gotta mean I’m the worst

 **You** (11:25 am): WINN

 **Alex** (11:26 am): It means you’re on The Chart

 **Winn** (11:26 am): What?

 **You** (11:26 am): YOU’RE OFFICIALLY AN HONORARY LESBIAN

 **Winn** (11:27 am): I… uh

 **Winn** (11:27 am): Is that a good thing?

 **Winn** (11:27 am): Am I the worst?

 **Alex** (11:27 am): No, you’re not the worst!

 **Alex** (11:28 am): You’re the opposite of the worst

 **You** (11:28 am): As to whether it’s a good thing…

 **You** (11:28 am): Depends, I guess

 **Alex** (11:28 am): The Chart is weird and kind of incestuous

 **You** (11:29 am): But being a lesbian is the best, so

 **Winn** (11:29 am): … I’m so lost

 **Alex** (11:29 am): Oh, duh

 **Alex** (11:30 am): Maggie

 **Alex** (11:30 am): He hasn’t seen The L-Word yet, has he

 **Winn** (11:30 am): No “he” hasn’t

 **You** (11:31 am): We’ll have to fix that

 **You** (11:31 am): As part of your initiation

 **You** (11:32 am): Ceremonial gifting of toaster

 **You** (11:32 am): Followed by L-Word screening

 **Winn** (11:33 am): I understand the toaster reference!

 **Winn** (11:33 am): That’s gotta count for something!

 **Alex** (11:35 am): Saturday night

 **Alex** (11:35 am): My place

 **You** (11:35 am): It’s on

 **Alex** (11:36 am): Bring Vaya if you want. If she wants.

 **Winn** (11:36 am): Okay

 **Winn** (11:37 am): ...so does that mean it’s okay for me to date Vaya?

 **You** (11:37 am): YES IT’S OKAY

 **Alex** (11:38 am): It’s great, Winn! We’re both really happy for you

 **You** (11:38 am): She’s an amazing girl. You guys make so much sense.

 **Winn** (11:38 am): Whew

 **Winn** (11:39 am): Thanks guys

 **Alex** (11:39 am): Of course.

 **You** (11:40 am): I love you.

 **You** (11:40 am): Both of you.

 **Winn** (11:41 am): Awwwww thanks bud

 **You** (11:41 am): In fact

 **You** (11:42 am): I think I’m going to go show my love to the one who made me french toast this morning

 **Alex** (11:42 am): Wait, no, Maggie

 **Alex** (11:42 am): It’s MY turn to show the love

 **Winn** (11:42 am): YOU GUYS

 **Alex** (11:43 am): If you could see how cute she is right now you’d understand, Winn

 **Winn** (11:43 am): I DON’T WANT TO UNDERSTAND

 **Alex** (11:43 am): And by cute I mean hot, with the bedroom eyes and no pants

 **Winn** (11:43 am): ALEX

 **You** (11:44 am): I can’t help it if eating your french toast makes me want to cover YOU in syrup, Alex

 **Alex** (11:44 am): I mean... we haven’t showered yet

 **Winn** (11:44 am): MY INNOCENT EYES

 **You** (11:45 am): You thinking what I’m thinking, Alex?

 **Alex** (11: 45 am): I think so, Maggie

 **You** (11: 46 am): Meet me in the bathroom?

 **Alex** (11: 46 am): I’ll bring the syrup

 **Winn** (11:46 am): WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME

 **Alex** (11:47 am): As a fellow lesbian, Winn, it’s your duty to love our love

 **Winn** (11:47 am): I DO

 **Winn** (11: 47 am): BUT COME ON

 **You** (11:47 am): Lesbian tip no. 1, Winn

 **You** (11:47 am): Never let your bed get cold

 **Winn** (11:48 am): MAGGIE

 **You**  (11:48 am): >:D

 **Winn** (11:49 am) Sigh.

 **Winn** (11:50 am): By the way

 **Winn** (11:50 am): I love you too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it ends.
> 
> Thanks to those of you who have stuck this through all the way. It's a different style and tone than I've normally written, and I've felt like I've grown tremendously as a writer in the process. Not everyone liked the style; I know a lot of people noped out after a chapter or two, so I'm especially grateful to those of you who stuck around.
> 
> I'll catch up on my comment responses, I promise!


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